The offline experience in 2016
These days ,according to opensignal.com, we have in developed countries over than 80% of 4G and LTE coverage (4th Q 2015), 3G in almost all the planet (even Antarctica), the wi-fi today can even be used on Subways all around the globe, and the internet speed is improving exponentially. Ok this is awesome, so… why is so important to be able to use our apps offline? well, for many reasons, but the number one reason for me is user experience.
Imagine this situation, you live in a neighborhood with bad 3G reception, so your reliability on the internet depends exclusively on wi-fi networks, you are at your home doing some work, has written some emails perhaps, and has also attached some files on them, on your way out of your home you press send, the files haven’t been send yet, but you are already out.
Remember, you have bad 3G reception and you left your home so you don’t have wi-fi any more, if the email app you are using have offline capabilities, and almost with certainty that’s the case, these emails will be sent in the moment that the app detect a network again, if your app doesn’t, well let’s say you can forget that these emails will be seen by anyone any time soon…
These days we have, in developed countries, 4G and LTE networks, 3G in almost all the rest, the wi-fi today can even be used on Subways all around the globe.
But we do not care about this issue, we know that those emails are going to meet their goals right? why? because email applications are taking care of this issue from day 1, and we are using mail since the beginning of the internet.
Email is an easy example, because we are talking about a system that detects an email waiting to be send, for this purpose this apps got a queue, which is the place where the outgoing emails waiting to be sent, like a document in a printer queue, you can print one document at a time, but you can send to print an infinity amount of documents, each wait their turn in the queue, even if the app doesn't do a thing on the moment that the network is back, you can manually send them later.
The real challenge is to use cloud base apps seamlessly across devices and don’t even care if you are online or not, example: you read an article on the browser on your mobile phone while you are on the street, want to save it for later, the app alone will save the site on the local storage and in the moment detects a familiar network will send it to all your devices. This way you get home and open your browser on your desktop and your article is there for you to read, magic!.
Although, other scenario for this situation, you open the browser and nothing is there until your smartphone detects a network, maybe you where expecting for the data, maybe you forgot, no big deal right? yes it is a big deal, specifically because data is an important matter this days and if we add uncertainty to the equation we only get bad experience.
You open the browser and nothing is there until that your smartphone detects a network, no big deal right? yes it is a big deal…
If we have to wait when the device is connected for the data to come we will get into a point we will lose the track of the amount of data required, so we’ll be waiting for some results to come that maybe never will. At the same time we will loose the track of where our data is located, i mean physically in which devices we have what data.
To help solve this problem companies started to show offline notifications, this improves the user experience informing the user that the app is offline and some capabilities won’t work because of that, but doesn’t resolve the problem because there is nothing the user can do with this information.
Imagine your phone detects that you are leaving your home and starts to send all the data even before you press send, bear with me, i’m not talking about sending messages before we want it so, but if the data involved is meta-data we can send it at any given moment.
This way we improved the flow of the data, and by doing this we also improved the user experience, i’m sure you read this and think: science fiction right? how your phone will detect that you are leaving your home, before you actually left? well there is one technology that together with the good and old GPS can help us here, Location Beacons to the rescue.
I’m not going to go deep on how this technology works, but basically location beacons are physical objects that together with software can alert apps when you approach or leave a location, Apple is using this on IOS by the name of iBeacons and Google also got his own Beacon platform API, so we can be sure that this technology is here to stay.
Imagine your phone detects that you are leaving your home and starts to send all the data even before you press send…
Take such as museums, instead of reading from a piece of paper next to the artwork, there is a beacon , your phone detects it and gets the relevant info , with a little configuration on your phone , adding your taste on art perhaps you can get alerts when you are approaching something that is more on your liking.
Taking this to our day-to-day use, can simplify in a huge way the amount of data that is being sent, because now we will send and receive in a smart way, location-based.
So in a world driven by Beacons we can use cloud applications freely, being able to use them offline without concern, because at the time of leaving home all our applications are synchronized. Even better, imagine that you want to watch a movie in the cinema, if you purchase the ticket at home, the phone will detect that is next to the theater and only then will download the tickets, brilliant!.
Let’s hope that in the near future all network problems will be only problems from the past and also that governments and leaders of the tech industry will use this technologies for the benefit of the masses and not only to commercialize it and get profit, let’s hope.
