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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather, or sending e-mails,

Except that thinking leads to really shitty behaviour from apps. Like weather apps that refuse to show you the data cached from the last time they checked, or e-mail apps (I'm looking at you here iOS GMail) that are feeble-to-useless at letting me read offline. Facebook: I should be able to check my events calendar offline, or look again at favourite photos.

The set of apps that consume online data is much, much larger than the set of apps that are usable if and only if they have absolutely live information.

By not thinking offline-first, too many apps behave like they're in the second set.

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Responding to you and everyone else using weather as an example:

NO, I don't EVER want cached weather data! In fact, it drives me nuts that when I look up the weather on my iPhone to see what the current temperature is outside, I have no idea if it's accurate or 20 degrees wrong, because it just assumes that cached data from 1am is good enough, until it happens to get a connection again. For people who live in places where the temperature can vary 40 degrees in a day, this is really important.

[Edit: why is this being downvoted? Is it not clear that I'm talking about current weather conditions, as opposed to 3-days-out? And that having my phone present stale data as current data can be harmful? Many people use their weather app for current conditions, not forecasts.]

Your weather app generally is able to show around a week of data in advance, so if I check weather today and am offline tomorrow, it should be able to show me a reasonable approximation.

Also you generally want to see what the weather is in the future, and its always a best guess, if you want an accurate way to know precisely if it is raining right now, look out the window.

And you asked for an explanation of why you are being downvoted, you are obviously trying very hard to make an example of a counter point for something that doesnt make sense '12 hours ago we thought the weather would be X' is unarguably better that 'this application is offline', but you are attempting to argue it. Even if you did find a single counterpoint it doesnt add anything to the conversation, not absolutely everything is going to have an offline use case, but its clear that we could do better providing offline capability (and to be clear, I didnt downvote)

Surely all that takes is a "last updated x hours ago" label and you have the best if both worlds?

Just because the current designs have flaws for your use cases doesn't mean we can never design around them.

You're being downvoted because based on a single, arguably marginal, use case ("I only ever want to know the exact temperature right this very second and everything else is useless to me") you're a claiming that there's no need for anybody to consider the much more important and larger use case of "I need my phone not to instantly become a dumb brick when it loses reception"

I saw elsewhere that you think mobile apps are already doing the right thing here. The reaction to you - and the point of the OP - is that they're not. Proper offline support is often a poor second in application design, if it's considered at all. We should change that.

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