[ValentineC]

> my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.

Gosh, I wish more apps did some kind of progressive "enhancement" and let people read already cached messages and do deferred sends like the old days, instead of being completely useless without a data connection.

[verelo]

I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged.

I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying to build a reliable app when the user has /some/ cell service, but not enough to operate the app reliably.

[c0nsumer]

Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things.

(And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. <sigh>)

[verelo]

Yeah, home depot is a tricky case. They have a huge array of products, and in my experience when you cant find something you need to search beyond the store you're in....so the database you need access to isn't exactly small. Makes a practical offline experience tricky.

Home depots website sucks anyway, slow, clunky, terrible touch space, and the search is awful.

Aside, they should ad cell repeaters inside to fix all this.

[c0nsumer]

If I have good service their mobile app is actually pretty quick, but I don't want to join their wifi so... Yeah. :\

[verelo]

Maybe in the US, in Canada i find their online services are pretty average. A lot of the time i search for something and i get a US link, much to my disapointment.