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📉 Bad Network Simulation (Network Conditioning)

Testing apps under ideal Wi-Fi conditions often masks critical bugs. Flocon provides a built-in Network Conditioner / Bad Quality Simulator that lets you simulate degraded network environments directly from the desktop companion — without touching your device's operating system settings.

Capabilities

With Flocon's Bad Network Simulation, you can configure:

  • Latency & Jitter: Add fixed delays or random latency ranges (e.g. 800ms – 3000ms) to test slow 2G/3G connections and timeout thresholds.
  • Failure Probability: Set a failure rate percentage (e.g. 25% of requests fail) to test retry mechanisms and offline resilience.
  • Custom Error Types: Choose between returning HTTP error codes (e.g. 500 Internal Server Error, 503 Service Unavailable) or hard transport exceptions (IOException, SocketTimeoutException).
  • Targeted Rules: Apply network degradation globally or target specific API domains/paths.

How It Works

  1. Open Flocon Desktop and navigate to the Network tab.
  2. Click the Network Conditioner / Bad Quality icon (or access it from the tools menu).
  3. Configure Latency:
  4. Enable Simulate Latency.
  5. Set Minimum Latency (e.g. 500 ms) and Maximum Latency (e.g. 2000 ms).
  6. Configure Error Simulation:
  7. Enable Simulate Errors.
  8. Set Failure Probability (e.g. 30%).
  9. Select Error Behavior: HTTP Status Code or Throw Exception.
  10. Toggle Enable Bad Quality.

Supported Clients

The Bad Network Simulation engine works automatically with any client using the Flocon interceptors, once the network plugin is installed (install(FloconNetwork), module flocon-network-core):

val okHttpClient = OkHttpClient.Builder()
    .addInterceptor(FloconOkhttpInterceptor())
    .build()

val httpClient = HttpClient {
    install(FloconKtorPlugin)
}

val channel = ManagedChannelBuilder.forAddress(host, port)
    .intercept(FloconGrpcInterceptor())
    .build()

Testing Real-World Scenarios

1. Elevator / Subway Simulation (Intermittent Drops)

Set failure rate to 40% with IOException errors to verify that your app shows user-friendly retry banners instead of crashing.

2. Slow 3G / Poor Reception (High Latency)

Set latency between 2000ms and 5000ms to verify that loading spinners, shimmer skeletons, and cancel-on-back navigation behave properly.

3. Backend Outage (503 Service Unavailable)

Configure a 100% failure rate returning HTTP 503 to ensure your maintenance/outage screens display correctly.