The WWDC App Is Unusable Offline
This weekend, my iPhone ran out of space and couldn’t take any more photos. No problem, I thought, I’ll just go into the WWDC app and delete some of the downloaded videos that I recently finished watching. Unfortunately, without a network connection, all the app shows is a progress spinner. There is no cached list of sessions or even of the videos that are filling up my phone. I thought this was supposed to be an example of the proper way to write a CloudKit app?
I have Cellular Data disabled for the WWDC app because it doesn’t do anything time-sensitive that would be worth counting towards my plan’s quota. I’ve already pre-downloaded all the videos I want to watch while on Wi-Fi. And, in this case, I didn’t have a good cell signal, anyway.
So I resorted to what I always do: going to Settings and temporarily deleting some music synced from my Mac. After transferring the photos to my Mac, iTunes automatically puts the music back. Music is a pragmatic way to reserve some easily purgeable storage.
6 Comments RSS · Twitter
Something's wrong with your app.
I'm often using it offline (I don't have network in transits) and just right now started it while the phone is in fly mode, and it properly gives me the list of downloaded videos (and also list all others videos).
Maybe the cache is corrupted or maybe the app misbehaves when it considers it to be too old.
@Jean-Daniel It works if I load the app while on a connection and then switch back to it later. But if I cold-launch it, it just spins. I don’t think it considered the cache to be old because I had used the app with a connection less than 24 hours prior.
I just try to set the phone in fly mode, reboot it, relaunch the wwdc app and it still work fine. It contains the full list of sessions and my downloaded videos. So the network should not be required even for cold start.
@Jean-Daniel I installed the WWDC app on a new phone, and it works as you describe. So I guess (unless it’s a matter of a longer cache expiration) something is messed up in its data store on my main phone. I’m not sure how to fix this other than by deleting and reinstalling the app and then manually re-downloading the desired videos.
I reproduced the problem again. I think it really is a bug in the app. Yesterday, I preloaded a bunch of videos. Today, it wouldn’t show them until I enabled cellular data, at which point it wasted a MB to show me what was already on the phone.
[…] At least it shows you the list of stories that you can’t access, instead of just an empty screen like the WWDC app. […]
