I know that I am showing my age, but I believe that programmers today assume that connectivity, processor power and storage will always be available and concentrate instead on the 'prettys'.

 
The Firstbus app put me in mind of the following as it appears to be particularly liable to being bitten by this - once the phone signal's contention ramps up, the app stalls and throws out a rather uninformative error message.

I'm wondering if the authors of these sort of apps need to concentrate on work to reduce the volume of data that needs to be exchanged at these times, or to make the handling of this situation more efficient so that the app has a better chance of continuing to work when the network connection is less than good. For starters, they don't appear to cache the image and therefore data-heavy operations such as their handling of maps.

Perhaps the likes of MQTT technology offer an opportunity to improve things? (MQTT is a communications technology much used by the 'Internet of things' to exchange small amounts of data on a network connection that may be poor quality or unstable. I've no idea what I'm talking about here so may be out on a limb).

Mark