Comment by xenator
2 months ago
During earthquake in Bangkok in Friday Grab (local superior version of Uber) helped me to order taxi and get my kids home. Needless to say that cell phones network collapsed for most of the day. All people want to know what happens and is their family and friends are safe. They definitely have very optimized network layer for poor connections. I bet they can switch to udp or something. I'm glad that it wasn't web app.
In many other cases I agree with you.
99% likely they're using a REST API, which is... HTTP.
Even if it's gRPC or something more exotic, it'll be over TLS (you best hope it is).
You can have a webapp cached locally on your device. PWAs allow developers to create an SPA you can open from your homescreen, and to do that API interaction the same way as a native app.
I hope you and your family are well, and it's great that tech helped. But please, don't think that because this tech worked in this instance it can't be made safer and securer.
Switching to UDP won't magically improve your network connectivity. The overhead of WebRTC over UDP isn't too high as well.