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> Granted building a fallback into the design at the beginning would have been a better way to do things

Notice that, that building the fallback is not building a fallback for the location API but for all the cloud based APIs that the app uses (or atleast the critical ones.) Then there is impedance mismatch between each of these APIs.

Definitely useful to do but sounds like a lot of work.

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Agreed, If the fallback is using another service provider's API. I wouldn't recommend that because you then have to maintain version changes to each API. A fallback could also have been caching, slowly adding data to your own solution as users used the API so that the outage would affect some users whose queries were not cached or part of own solution. There could be more fallback strategies but I totally agree with you that using fallback APIs is not a good idea in terms of long term maintenance.

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