What I mean to say is that, whether or not your mobile device has bad internet or not shouldn't matter. Most applications are buffering their reads and writes.

What I mean to say is that, whether or not your mobile device has bad internet or not shouldn't matter. Most applications are buffering their reads and writes. This makes TCP_NODELAY a non-issue Most importantly buffering doesn't spend a whole bunch of CPU time context switching into the kernel. Even if you are taking advantage of Nagle's, every call to write is a syscall, which calls into the kernel to perform the write. On a mobile device this would tank your battery. This is the main reason writes are buffered in applications.