I have recently been in Cornwall in the far southwest of England. Broadband in Cornwall is always at a legendary glacial speed, at least away from the few places with fibre. The best WiFi performance I could get was 0.13megabit/s down, 0.3 up. Often slower or much slower. This was measured with speedtest.net. That app was measuring a ping time of between 0.8 and 1.4 SECONDS! (to a server in Bristol, in a better served part of the UK. The WiFi point I was using used WEP)
I observed that aqua mail and a number of other apps just failed to sync or access servers, quite understandably. Browsers usually worked up to a point, and google play store *always* worked.
I am trying to understand if there are timeouts built into individual apps like aqua mail that would be sensitive to the long ping time or low speed, or just what magic the google play app deploys to use the poorest of connections reliably.
Just curious.