Not shilling my solution; this is nowhere near actually good yet, but it was "good enough" to fix the problem for me too. Only posting it as proof that I had the same thing happen to me, and maybe it can help others too.
If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.
I think you're right on the money—those bad web apps that told people emphatically "do NOT use your browser's back button!" did the rest of us a lot of damage, as I really do agree that it trained many people to never press it unless they actually want to leave the app they're using.
I myself am guilty of (about 14 years ago now) giving an SPA a "reload" button, which had it go and fetch clean copies of the current view from the server. It was a social app; new comments and likes would automatically load in for the posts already visible, but NEW posts would NOT be loaded in, as they would cause too much content shift if they were to load in automatically.
Admittedly this is not a great solution, and looking back on it now, I can think of like 10 different better ways to solve that issue… but perhaps some users of that site are seeing my comment here, so yeah, guilt admitted haha.
Not sure which part you were in, but this is just not true in my experience. I've been to Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and some others, and Mandarin really is a must if you want to even have a chance of communicating. I can't imagine how I'd function here if I only had English.
I've not yet been to Shanghai, and while I would expect the English-speaking percentage to be a bit higher, it would still likely only be in the single-digits by my estimation.
My father-in-law here in China uses handwriting input, but everyone else I've seen here uses Pinyin, and it's totally fast and natural for them.
And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be?
Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.
Bingo. I doubt the Open Handset Alliance would've gotten off the ground had they charged the kind of licensing fees common at the time by Symbian and Windows Mobile. What would convince manufacturers to pay into an (at the time) remarkably immature platform and gamble their devices' success on it?
But make it free… and now you've suddenly got their attention.
