Mobile apps often assume that we live in a world where online access is not merely widely available, but ubiquitous. Turn on your smartphone or tablet, the thinking goes, and a 3G or 4G connection or else a nice fat-bandwidth Wi-Fi network is right there waiting for you, ready to do your app's bidding. Wouldn't it be nice to live in that world? A world in which there are no 3G or 4G deadspots, in which Wi-Fi networks reach every square inch of a company's offices or a person's home, even a basement, somehow. A world in which Wi-Fi networks never go down. A world in which you're never on an airplane that doesn't have WiFi. The always-on wireless nirvana. I don't live there. Do you? I thought not. Neither do company's workforces. We all struggle with getting work done when there's no Internet access, with trying to sync data before and after we know we're going to go dark. With clueless apps that can't handle caching and syncing properly. With data conflicts because of those problems.
Comment