Misleading information when starting app while offline.

zulip / zulip-mobile

Zulip mobile apps for Android and iOS.

https://zulip.com/apps/

Apache License 2.0

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Misleading information when starting app while offline. #2721

Open roberthoenig opened 6 years ago

roberthoenig commented 6 years ago

This is me starting the app while offline: bug2

A couple bugs here:

No Not connected to the internet banner is shown.
The topic list is displayed, but clicking on a topic does nothing. I'd either expect the app to not allow me to click on topics, or aloow me to click on them and show the last n messages cached for that topic.
The All Streams screen shows "No streams found", even though it just couldn't load a list of streams from the server.
No users and messages are shown. Every other messaging app caches my messages, so this is very surprising for me as a user. Now, Zulip is different from other chat platforms in that there is many more messages and only a small percentage is sent by me. I think it'd be reasonable to at least store all users and all PMs with them, so Zulip matches messaging apps. Not sure what to do about public messages.

borisyankov commented 6 years ago

Thanks for that investigation and bug report. It is very important to do more testing of the app's behavior when offline as this will be a frequent occurrence in real-life mobile use.

Each <li> you listed is likely a separate bug. I think two of them are trivial to fix and I am doing it right now. Would you mind splitting them?

roberthoenig commented 6 years ago

@borisyankov just to get in sync, I'm currently trying the Not connected to the internet banner on my own.

roberthoenig commented 6 years ago

Let me know if you wanna go ahead and fix this, but I'd appreciate the opportunity to try this and get some feedback :) My approach is to move the <OfflineNotice /> tag to a prominent position in the app:

...
            <StylesProvider>
              <OfflineNotice />
              <AppWithNavigation />
            </StylesProvider>
...

Is this the right direction?

borisyankov commented 6 years ago

Go ahead, I am investigating the other issues :)

One issue might be that the state might not be initialized correctly if starting from the offline state.

Also, on the OfflineNotice being moved up the chain that looks reasonable, but I think it will show above our top navigation UI which wouldn't look good. Not a bad idea to try it.

roberthoenig commented 6 years ago

untitled

This is what I have now. I don't think it looks good, but it doesn't look bad either. One advantage this top display has that it doesn't change position over different screens.

I tried to animate it on appearance and disappearance, without success so far.