[alkonaut]

Disagree with the gist of the post. Completing after 75% doesn't mean completing after 75%. It means the developers had to estimate the time taken for 2 subtasks (e.g. uploading and committing via an API request) and said that uploading was likely 75% and the commit step 25%. What happens is likely that the final 25% was so fast it seemed instant.

The options are: 1) don't show progress. Show a marquee, as to not lie. This is terrible. Please don't do this. 2) Show two phases. E.g. the first phase progress runs slowly from 0-100 and the second one runs instantly from 0-100. 3) Guess better. Such as do it adaptively. The expected time for phase N is estimated from data (e.g. last time for commit phase, or from a bandwidth estimate from last upload times the file size). 5) Add a minimum phase time so that instantaneous completion takes e.g. 50ms, so people get time to see the completion at 100%. 4) Do nothing. No one expects progress bars to run linearly.

There are so many good options that are better than "don't show progress, only show activity". Even the do nothing/status quo alternative is much better than no progress bar.