[77ko]

Got a pixel 2, Chromecast and a Google home and now have lots of wifi woes. The timing being exactly after the pixel 2 (turned in cast and home before, didn't have problems).

Edit: turning of guest mode on all cast devices makes things better (less wifi dropouts) but still bad. Turning of wifi on both the android phones in my house has cleared up the wifi problem (which was really annoying as even spotify kept failing to stream with phones on wifi).

I wonder if Google employees need to test their consumer devices outside the googleplex where the internet is super fast and the industrial grade networking gear deals with such issues automagically.

[londons_explore]

In the Googleplex they have networks designed to be slow and crappy to test exactly this.

All people working on consumer facing apps and sites are encouraged to use these crappy networks on a day to day basis.

[nmstoker]

I wish there was more evidence that they used them. Far too often their software seems to assume a superb connection.

Personal "favourite" is their Newsstand - it will ditch cached stories whilst out and about because it briefly got a connection on the Underground, only for the content to not download (precisely because you're on flakey Tube WiFi) and boom the best use case for that software is ruined!

[stefco_]

I was in Costa Rica last week with a slow wifi connection and had a similar experience with a 5MB offline PDF file in Google Drive. For some reason, drive decided to redownload it, but after only a minute it timed out and gave up. I just ended up going for two more days without the file, but I found it pretty ridiculous that Drive failed so miserably on such a simple use case.

I had a nearly seamless (albeit slightly slower) experience browsing Instagram on that slow connection despite the fact that all of the content was photo/video media, so I know the connection was not completely useless. It seems that Google engineers can't even fathom the possibility that someone would have a slow enough connection that a 5MB file might need more than a minute to download. This is frustrating.

[kuschku]

It's pretty obvious they're not properly testing with that, though. I'm testing as a developer myself on a 2013 phone on throttled 4G (so I get between 64kbps and 1Mbps, depending on situation), on public transit – so connection drops all the time.

The result is that while some of my apps work fine, and a handful of apps work great, I’ve not yet found a single Google app that actually is usable in that situation.

[snarfy]

Encouraged, but not required? Yeah that's going to happen.

[dsnuh]

I got a Pixel 2 also. So far wifi has been behaving, but Bluetooth has been a pain in the ass.