This is an incredibly real problem. As someone who sells high performance networking to mobile apps[1], it's unbelievable how many people will say their load times are "fast enough," but when you dig into how they reached that conclusion it's in fact only on their near-flawless enterprise WiFi with 0% packet loss. They just don't put themselves into the actual shoes of their users.<p>More, I have yet to find an organization that understands -- or even measures -- their business metrics with respect to network type. There is decent understanding of the notion of performance, clearly, but abhorrent understanding of performance as a _parameter_. The vast majority of people just don't ask basic questions like "how do my users on 3G engage differently than on LTE?".<p>If anyone has any ideas about how we can educate people about their performance problems I'm all ears!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.caffei.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.caffei.net/</a> (happy to answer any questions or rant offline, just drop me a line: james at our site address)
I concur 100%, it is important to test under realistic conditions.<p>I used Xcode's link conditioner tool to test a custom protocol under packet loss and latency.<p>With Wireshark you can see TCP retransmissions. In my case, TCP introduced too much latency since the guarantees it offers are costly under certain circumstances.<p>So I moved to UDP and reworked the protocol to have fire-and-forget messages.