The paper stats on 2G would make it seem like it should work in theory, especially if it's using EDGE or something, but it just consistently fails in the field. You'll get partial renders and then it will jam up. It's super, super frustrating to use. Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something and that just cancels all the async downloads and restarts them.

There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.

Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.

Well it's not ever going to be actual 2G. It's a throttle. I'm not sure how much worse it could get when you have a reasonably solid signal, but I guess nothing stops network engineers from doing something awful.

> Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something

At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible.

And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.