As someone who lives less than five miles from the Atlantic ocean in NJ, I’ve been having a bit of a bad time recently due to Hurricane Sandy. Luckily, I was not harmed nor were any of my loved ones in the crisis. I did, however, notice something important: even my non-techie friends and relatives were glued to their smart phones, hoping to hear some news about the storm, find out when their vital services (power / gas) might be restored, or (most importantly) check on their loved ones.
There are plenty of mobile apps that can be very helpful for handling a crisis, however, this recent crisis has shown me that there is something rotten in the state of app development — especially on the iOS side.
Let’s frame the scene a bit. During Sandy battery power was worth more than gold-plated platinum; for those of you unfamiliar with mobile development one of the most battery intense things most apps do is download data — especially image data. Up until today, I was out of power and the only access my fiance and I had to the outside world was out smartphones. Between us we have an iPhone 4S, a Galaxy Nexus, and a Lumia 900. We used all three phones to find pertinent data regarding the crisis.
I noticed some trends for roughly equivalent apps on each platform. The Windows Phone apps tended to load the fastest with the Android apps loading about as fast — I had no tools to do any real benchmarking, so these observations are all anecdotal. Sadly, my iPhone did not perform so well. I wondered why for a few minutes. After all, they were all on 3G (the LTE Nexus had LTE turned off to conserve power) and the Lumia which was on AT&T should have been at a distinct disadvantage since Sandy had already claimed one of the local AT&T towers.
The difference was not with the network or OS’s or devices. It was about priorities in the apps themselves. While the Android and Windows Phone apps focussed on providing pertinent data in simple text based lists, the iOS apps were constantly trying to download images alongside the data. These images took a long time to load and therefore used an unnecessary amount of battery power. Worse still, after I regained my power earlier today, I reopened the iOS apps in question and they committed what is in my mind a mortal sin of mobile development: they all tried to download ‘retina’ resolution images over 3G.
Ridiculous. I understand that high-res images can make an app look good, but there is no need to download them over the air. Still, if you insist on downloading images that large, then please only do so over wifi. This is especially true if you app is geared toward helping people in a crisis.
