Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
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Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#12Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
I/they (I am no longer with Opera Software) did that for a decade with Opera Mini. It's an interesting engineering challenge.
It got us lots of users (0.25B monthly actives) but they are (relatively speaking) quite poor, so ad revenues aren't as high as you might wish. So you need a lean operation, at least if your operating cost is significant - like transcoding web pages for 1/30th of the global population...
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#13Cue corporate IT departments everywhere advertising the slow internet speeds as "We are helping you empathize with the developing world"
Today I found out my megacorp has been leading the charge to help me empathize with our customers in Africa. It's a sad day when my latency to the internet in Europe is higher than our actual satellite connection to a remote site in Africa.
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#14Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
Why?
Edit: It seems to me that depending on the market one targets there's not much to be gained from designing for slow connection speeds...
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#15Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
No every software shop in the world should be designing to the requirements of their target userbase -- which often is not India.
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#16We, at hike ( http://www.hike.in), did following things:
1. gave the cheap android smartphone to use as their primary phone
2. asked employees to stay on 2G on their mobile phones
It helped a us lot to improve our product for India market.
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#17In unrelated news, Facebook employees have begun to organize "Work from home Tuesdays".
They're smart about it: > When a Facebook employee logs into the app any Tuesday morning, they'll see a prompt at the top of their News Feed asking whether they want to try out the slower connection for an hour.
and then they use that info when evaluating an employee's eagerness to move forward, be a team player etc. !
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#18Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
No every software shop in the world should be designing to the requirements of their target userbase -- which often is not India.
This is the correct answer. A parallel is also designing for outdated internet browsers.
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#19Wonderful! - but it seems a tad late. :) Even the poorest parts of India should be about to move to 3G (or even 4G) within the next few years due to the more efficient usage of spectrum. Of course it would be insanely overloaded with lots of delayed packets...
So, what I'm hearing from you is it is not too late.
Re: Facebook '2G Tuesdays' to better understand markets like India
#20Every software shop in the world should be designing and coding for low connectivity speeds.
Why? Edit: It seems to me that depending on the market one targets there's not much to be gained from designing for slow connection speeds...
Probably because you don't know where your app will blow up. Unless the app is geographically restricted, there's no real telling where the spark will happen. Maybe it unintentionally solves a massive problem that is happening right now in India, and you suddenly have a massive influx of 2G users. If you hadn't even considered the experience for them, it won't matter how quickly it blows up; it'll fizzle immediately when you have a shitty experience.
For example, on my trip a few weeks ago, I used T-Mobile's free 2G roaming to get around. Searching for something on Google was pretty quick, and loading a Wikipedia page also was relatively fast. But the second I moved away from them and onto real sites that didn't try to optimize for lower speeds, I was pulling my hair out at how much data was trying to get sucked down on such a slow connection. It took minutes to load some websites.