I sure hope not. It's rare for me to encounter SaaS that provides a better service than something I can install and run natively.
I'd wager that Nokia provides equal, if not - arguably - better quality than Google maps and I don't need to incur insane roaming charges when using a map abroad.
Granted, there are a few functions, that require a net connection, but basic map functionality and navigation works very well without being on-line.
Maps are only one example. I can't think of many applications, which I would prefer as a "cloud" based service as opposed to native.
Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.
Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.
Here's a great tool for getting a feel:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...
Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.
You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.
Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage.
I'm not seeing a problem.
Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.
And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?
That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.
If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.
There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.
SAAS is inferior in:
* games
* text editors
* photo editors
* IDEs
Backup storage is okay, but I live in a country with tight bandwidth caps so I can't really use things, plus I don't want Google or Dropbox or MeGa snooping at what I upload.
So I would never pay to use any of the above things, and I would certainly NEVER pay Adobe for anything. I'm fortunate that I don't need to use their products.
> * games
Isn't steam like this? The bits get downloaded to your machine, but if Steam goes offline your SOL.
What steam could use is better download management. If they moved over to an on-demand streaming architecture it'd be really huge. The days you'd need to preload software could be over. This sort of thing has been solved many times before, so it's technically possible. In fact, as I type this I wonder why they haven't done it already.
It does have an "offline mode" where it will pre-decrypt the games or whatever it does behind the scenes.
Why would on-demand streaming be a good thing? Now you have to worry about ISPs and bandwidth, it doesn't solve the problem.
I need to worry about ISPs and bandwidth before, it's just that now I can be more frivolous with what I have installed on my machine (no sense leaving something installed "just in case").
Funny you mention Mappoint. It's exactly what I use when I'm navigating for my wife on trips. It works fine in areas with poor wireless data coverage. (We supplement with Waze to get traffic reports, but "self-hosted" Mappoint guarantees we won't lose map coverage because of radio issues.)