The difference in user experience between HTML apps that don't even _try_ to cache anything locally vs mobile apps that sync in the background and cache things locally is night and day and it just gets bigger and bigger as your bandwidth quality gets worse.
This is the biggest reason why I'm concerned for the future of the open web.
I agree 100% with your general sentiment, but just to nitpick:
You would have to really cherry pick the worst case possible scenario to be paying R1 per GB and even then R1024 is $82.44.
Contracts come with data included, all the networks have data bundles, most of them run frequent 2-for-1 style promotion deals and you could always shop around.
Once you factor in all of that, mobile bandwidth is pretty on par with most of the world. Really expensive when you take into account people's incomes, though.
ADSL and other fixed line / point-to-point options are much cheaper once you require anything more than a tiny amount of data, but still really expensive considering the typical South African's income.
Things are very different from the first world, but you have to factor in physics too - we're at the opposite end of the world of just about anything you would want to connect to (latency!), our neighbours didn't all have connections already set up that we could just piggy-back off, etc.
I still really want to get a few bags full of Zimbabwean notes and use it to wallpaper a room one day. You'd think that would be easy living in a country right next to them..
It's a reasonable cloud vs. on-premise argument. Obviously the scale of the data transfer to a cloud has more to do with the dataset size than the number of instances.
I'm pretty convinced that self driving cars can fix this. Reaction times will be much faster and they can network together to spread out the braking and acceleration. Possibly even merging at high speed.
A more powerful potential mechanism is that they can be programmed to respect do not enter directives from a traffic control system (keeping human drivers off a freeway would take a lot of infrastructure). So the amount of traffic on the road can be regulated to keep it below the capacity implied by the safe response time of the vehicles.
If an image fails to load, the browser draws a little box with some alternate text describing that box. If the CSS doesn't load, your text and content is displayed in a weird font without the grid layout you were using, but if you wrote your HTML semantically (using <h1> instead of <div class="title"> etc.), the browser can still show most of your content, and you can still move around on the page.
If the JavaScript fails to load and you were using it to significantly alter the content on your page, for example loading a news article asynchronously, the entire page fails to load.
I don't mean to pick on this app in particular (I actually think it's really cool and I plan on using it and learning from it), but take a look at what happens to http://hswolff.github.io/hn-ng2/ when you switch off JavaScript--it's completely unusable. Now try switching off JavaScript on Hacker News--all the links and comments are still there.
> If the JavaScript fails to load and you were using it to significantly alter the content on your page, for example loading a news article asynchronously, the entire page fails to load.
Worse. Half the time the content is sent synchronously in the initial HTML, but keep hidden until a JS script has its way with it. Looking at you Markdown.js.
There is a LOT of lithium in the world and that's just near the surface - you can always dig down.
But at that scale you don't have to use lithium anyway. When it comes to grid or off-grid storage, you don't need the best energy density as cost per watt-hour is probably the most important factor and there are already other chemistries on the market that will work just fine with many more on the way. Sodium or Aluminium based batteries seem particularly promising.
