Flutter apps for firewall season: making your app usable when Pakistani internet is crawling
Yaar, if you build apps in Pakistan you know the seasons. Summer, monsoon, wedding season, and firewall season. When the internet slows down "for reasons", VPNs crawl, WhatsApp images do not load, and my clients in Dubai think our app is broken. Our app is not broken. The pipe is. So this is what we changed in our Flutter apps. We are a two person studio, the clients are in Dubai and Riyadh, but most of our test…
- This pairs nicely with my low-bandwidth API thread. Backend and app meet in the middle: small payloads and idempotency keys from the API, caching and polite retries in the app.
- Late but pwoli post machane! Kerala monsoon is our firewall season 😅 One more: pass a CancelToken to the retry, so if the user leaves the screen you stop retrying in the background