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Since we're talking about BC, they released their wildfire app[1] a few years ago and made it so you can't use the website from mobile anymore. The rationale be

Since we're talking about BC, they released their wildfire app[1] a few years ago and made it so you can't use the website from mobile anymore. The rationale being that this app can notify you of evacuations in progress Unsurprisingly it's much worse than the website itself and not working well (look at the comments). I think you have a point, but Twitter was very reliable until it was bought out, and served as a centralized notification channel where you could have all your sources, official and informal. I don't want to have to replace it by 6 different apps for weather alerts, drivebc alerts, wildfire alerts and so on; especially if they are worse than Twitter. I also prefer my government to spend money on the actual service (predicting weather, tracking and fighting fires, tracking traffic) than on duplicating the work of creating a delivery channel. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bc.gov.WildfireInformation https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.bc.gov.Wild...

throwbadubadu 3y ago
I simply hate this world with everyone wanting to shove an app to your smartphone (which you maybe don't even have, what about those people?).. sigh. Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution. :(
ransackdev 3y ago
Even with the app, you're still relying on APNS and GCM for push notifications, so it's not really getting "proprietary infrastructure you have no control over" out of the critical path. Granted, Apple and Google push services rarely go down, but it's still funneling public safety alerts through a non-government entity, and last I checked (years and years ago) there were no metrics or insights into deliverability, retries, opens/clicks/views, etc, plus those services do have rate limits too. The push api is a thing now, and it can send notifications to clients even when the site is not open[1]. Imo they'd be better off bringing the mobile site back and wiring up a service worker and the push api. All open standards and nobody between them and you :) 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API

throwbadubadu 3y ago

I simply hate this world with everyone wanting to shove an app to your smartphone (which you maybe don't even have, what about those people?).. sigh. Usual icing on cake: Experience worse or broken than longtime working and more accessible previous solution. :(

ransackdev 3y ago

Even with the app, you're still relying on APNS and GCM for push notifications, so it's not really getting "proprietary infrastructure you have no control over" out of the critical path. Granted, Apple and Google push services rarely go down, but it's still funneling public safety alerts through a non-government entity, and last I checked (years and years ago) there were no metrics or insights into deliverability, retries, opens/clicks/views, etc, plus those services do have rate limits too. The push api is a thing now, and it can send notifications to clients even when the site is not open[1]. Imo they'd be better off bringing the mobile site back and wiring up a service worker and the push api. All open standards and nobody between them and you :) 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API