Question on best practices

[Nancy Wirsig McClure]

When developing an app for a tablet, do you consider how it works for users who lack an always-on net connection?

In other words...
Mobile developers probably don't personally use wi-fi-only devices, but I'm less connected (I'm just a hanger-on here). I have a 1st gen iPad with only wi-fi, not 3G (although updated to the latest iOS). Like most consumers, I don't know how to use my smartphone as a hotspot, although I hope to learn.

An example of software that fails for wi-fi-only users...
I use four magazine apps to read the latest issues. TIME just updated their app, and now it loads the content selectively. It doesn't actually fetch an individual article from the net until I go to view the page (or perhaps it's based on page-blocks rather than articles). I used to be able to download the whole issue at once, and then read it when I'm not near a wi-fi hotspot. I totally relied on that feature.

When developing for iPad, do you try to create a good UX on a wi-fi-only iPad? Or do you (or your clients) choose to disregard consumers like me?

-- Nancy Wirsig McClure
   Graphics for UI and more
   http://www.hand2mouse.com

[Preston Crawford]

My 2 cents? You are the rule, not the exception. Most people don't care to run personal hotspots. Most people don't carry a 3G connection in their tablet. An even if they do a connection can be spotty while in foreign countries, on a plane, in a subway, etc.

I'm a gadget junkie. I have. 64GB iPhone 4S, 64GB iPad 2 and a MacBook air that I travel with frequently. That's to say that I am willing to pay for always having a connection and yet I run into situations constantly where I don't have one. Subways, tunnels, flights and rural communities being the best example. I can't even get a phone connection in downtown Cannon Beach. Definitely can't get one on the NY Subway (although the Moscow, Russia subway has full bars).

So my anecdotal and varies experience is that there are all kinds of ways and reasons not to have a connection, even if you try to have one. Every newsreader, magazine app, music service, etc. that I use has to have offline mode. With exceptions (immediate data needs like Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Maps) I won't use programs that don't cache data or that stop working if it can't ping a server.

Just my perspective. Hopefully that helps.

Sent from my iPhone

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[Elia Freedman]

I second Preston. For most apps it is really silly not to consider offline use. If nothing else you may choose to keep it in "airplane" mode (no connections on) just to preserve battery life.

[Jonathan Karon]

On Jan 27, 2012, at 12:26 PM, Nancy Wirsig McClure wrote:

> When developing an app for a tablet, do you consider how it works for users who lack an always-on net connection?

Absolutely. In fact, if you're publishing to iPad Apple requires you to at least think about the issue, as they specifically test for SOME sort of response to the app functioning in an offline environment.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to solve problems like syncing hundreds of megs of content (even 10s of megs) in a media app when people expect things to just work immediately. News Stand definitely solves this for a certain class of media but if you're not making a periodical then that's not helpful, and people grumble about app download size as much as they do anything else.

There are obviously entire classes of apps for which offline usage is not possible, and other classes that don't use the network at all. For things in between solving the problem of online / offline state management and sync is an extra step that some developers choose to ignore and others work at religiously.

It really depends on the target market for the app and how much the added work of offline mode fits with the product vision.

~jonathan