pokemapper

To be fair I wouldn't be surprised if the cause of this is precisely the purity of GrapheneOS: given it lacks Google services and Firebase Cloud Messaging to centralize app notifications through Google, the apps need to do frequent polling or keep an active connection to Facebook's infra to receive notifications. Same with Telegram, each has a slightly different polling mechanism when Google-powered push is not available (a common in phones without Google services), which is most likely way less power efficient.

I got another fun story from the other side. I worked at one of the few small companies that provided free Openstreetmap-powered basemaps at the time: you could just grab our map tile URL, plug it into Leaflet or any other mapping lib, and get a instant basemap with OSM data, provided you gave credit to us and under some not really restrictive ToS. In fact you probably used us at the time.

The technology behind those tiles wasn't really sophisticated back then -- a few oversized and replicated PostgreSQL servers with PostGIS and the OSM data loaded and synchronized frequently with a few materialized views on top, and a bunch of servers painting tiles with Mapnik using them as a source (there are a few options that started to prove to be more efficient at the time, but that's what we decided to go on then for other reasons), with a few layers of caching on the front. Tile rendering times for cache misses weren't really good depending on the complexity of the requested tile, given most stuff wasn't prerendered, but once things got cached and since most popular maps were localized to specific regions that got quickly cached, this worked pretty well after the first visitor had came.

But then... Pokemon Go and your bazillion maps came with the worst scale test for our design you could ever think of: a volume of tile requests a few levels of magnitude higher than usual, of locations from the half of the world playing Pokemon Go back then, zooming to _their streets_ (which were randomly distributed all over the world and therefore most probably uncached at that zoom level) to try and find their closest Charmanders.

Needless to say, those were some few nice days of firefighting and playing whack-a-mole replicating databases, adjusting caches, banning requests from the worst offenders and, at some of the worst points, everything that included the word "poke" on their domain.