Grumpy Website

 

Well, that is definitely not you're expecting to see when the app says that it works “offline”.

Every weekday I spend an hour in a tram going through the forest because this is a way to my swimming pool. I live in the XXI century, and here we still don't have proper mobile service if we take a step out of a city. That's why we need to be prepared. And I was!

The day before I opened the reading app (MyBook), found some books there and downloaded them to the device. The app said “Available offline”, so in my world, it meant “I can open it whenever you want to because I don't need an internet connection for this”. Sounds reasonable, right?

Alright. I was on my way to the forest, watching the video on YouTube called “Software Disenchantment” when the video stopped on the slide titled “Everything barely works”. I wasn't surprised, because the browser hadn't cached the video, so it was expected. But I was prepared!

I opened my reading app, found the book (it was “Ward No. 6” by Chekhov; this detail makes the story much colorful, I'm sure), clicked on it and the app started to load something. I was waiting, but nothing was going to change. It was broken. App reload didn't help, the result was the same.

I didn't understand the reason. The book was completely free, it was “available offline”, but for some reason, the app wanted to download something from the server.

Well, I'm a tough guy, I'm ready for the shit like that. That's why I had a course on Coursera which I had downloaded a week before that day. You should always be ready to meet a broken app! And I was!

I opened Coursera, found the course, found a right week and exact video that I wanted to watch, clicked on it and... got the login screen. Because, you know, of course, you can watch the video offline, but first please let us check your name, subscription, sex, blood type, favourite meal and Moon phase, just to be sure that you're allowed to watch the content that you downloaded a week ago to your own smartphone.

But as I said, I'm a tough guy, and I'm always ready. That's why I had Yandex.Music app with a bunch of songs in the offline storage. It had never let me down. I opened it and saw that I couldn't pick any song because all of them are unavailable. Why? Because my subscription period starts from the 14th day of the month, and it was September 16, and I hadn't opened the app since September 10. So it didn't know that my subscription had been automatically prolonged (as it always did more than 20 times before that moment), and, of course, it wanted to be sure that I was allowed to listen to the music. So it needed to connect to the server just to check it. But, again, of course, there was no sign of it. Just one more broken app.

One more app that promised to work offline but it couldn't.