[potatolicious]

> "A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather, or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon."

They aren't fully functional without fast connectivity, but they aren't useless. It is shocking how many ways apps break when offline.

- If I'm offline I should still be able to view the last weather report I got. Many apps simply refuse to work and throw up an unhelpful "you're offline" screen instead.

- If I'm offline I should still be able to type out a reply to emails. In fact, I should be able to queue it for sending, and my device should intelligently take care of it at the next connection opportunity.

- Similarly, if I'm offline I should still be able to view emails that I have seen recently.

There are a lot of ways people can interact with apps while experiencing no/poor connectivity. I believe the essay is simply saying that some basic affordances should be built into your apps - that features which don't strictly require a network connection shouldn't fail in ugly ways when the network is down. It is atrocious how many mobile apps have only one reaction to a loss of connectivity: completely shut off all access to everything.

[branksy]

But... phone apps already do all those things, so I don't get what you're complaining about. My point is, apps already seem to be doing the right things. So what's some kind of new manifesto needed for? What is supposed to be changed?

[ajanuary]

I just downloaded the first 4 results for 'weather' on my iphone. 2 refused to show any data offline, one showed cached data without saying it was, and one showed a needlessly verbose error about being offline, then showed cached data with an indication of how stale it was.

So no, not all apps are already doing the right thing.

[steveklabnik]

Phone apps might, most web apps do not. Hence this post.