The moment you discover you should have downloaded something is always the moment you can no longer download it. That is the whole problem with offline preparation, and it is why it has to become a routine rather than a decision. What follows is five minutes, done on home wifi the night before, that covers a long drive properly. It ends with the part nearly everyone skips, which is checking that the download actually finished. MileSmile is in here because a conversation game has to be prepared like anything else, and most people assume it does not.
Why the night before, and not the car park
Two reasons, and the second is the one that catches people.
The obvious one is time. A film is a few gigabytes and a car park is not where you want to find that out. The less obvious one is that the signal in the place you are leaving from is often already bad. Motorway services, an airport drop-off, a hotel forecourt at eight in the morning: all of these have a lot of people on one mast, so you get a connection that says it works and then transfers almost nothing. Home wifi at nine the previous evening has none of that.
There is also the plain fact that you are calmer. A download you started while packing finishes on its own. A download you start while three people wait in a running car gets cancelled halfway.
The five minutes
Minute one: maps
Save the region, not the route. Routes are useless the moment somebody misses an exit, and the whole reason you want an offline map is the wrong turn. Include the destination area and anywhere you might stop for food. If you are going somewhere with its own app, a national park or a large site, download that too, because its map has the things a general map does not.
Minute two: music and one long thing
An album or two per person, and one thing that runs for hours. An audiobook, a podcast series, a long mix. The long thing exists for the stretch where the conversation has run out and nobody wants to start a new one.
Minute three: the questions and the voice
This is the step that gets missed. A conversation game that generates fresh questions fetches them from a server as you play, so with no signal it has nothing to say.
In MileSmile you set a topic or a deck to one of two offline levels. Text saves the questions themselves, so a passenger can read them out. Audio saves the questions and their recorded voice, which is the level Car Mode needs: the app reads each question aloud and the driver moves on with the buttons on the steering wheel. If you are driving, audio is the one you want.
For a topic of your own, set how many questions to keep. The range is 20 to 100, in tens. Twenty is a school run. For a full day, put it near the top, because you cannot add to it once the bars are gone. Ready-made decks download whole, and the phone will hold up to 25 of them, so pick the two or three that suit the people actually in the car.
Worth knowing what costs what: downloading a ready-made deck's questions is free, while keeping your own topics offline and downloading the voice are part of the paid plan.
Minute four: everything else
One film per child, screenshots of the tickets or the booking, the address written somewhere that is not a browser tab. Charge everything, and put the power bank in the door pocket rather than in the boot under the luggage.
Minute five: check it landed
Put the phone in flight mode and open the things you just prepared. Play ten seconds of the album. Open the map and scroll off the visible area. Open the game and step through two questions.
This takes under a minute and it is the only step that actually proves anything. Everything before it is an intention.
The failure this catches
Big downloads stop quietly. A phone that goes to sleep, a wifi network that drops for a moment, a battery saver deciding a background transfer can wait, and the download stops without announcing anything. You come back to something that looks finished and is not.
MileSmile is unusually plain about this, which is useful. While it is saving questions it shows you the count as it goes and tells you the audio follows as they arrive. If the audio stops short it says so on the row and asks you to tap the audio level again to fetch the rest. That notice is the thing to look for. A ring that has filled up only tells you the questions you are about to play are covered, so treat the absence of the missing-audio line as the finish rather than the ring.
The general habit is the same for anything: look for the completed state, not the started state. A progress bar that has moved is not a progress bar that has finished.
How much room this takes, and getting it back
Text is negligible. A hundred saved questions is a rounding error next to a single photograph.
Audio is the part with a real size, because each question and each answer is a recorded clip. Where it can, MileSmile gives you a rough size before starting, so you see a number before you commit to it, and Settings carries a row showing about how much space the downloaded audio is using, which removes all of it once you confirm. Removing the audio leaves the saved questions in place, which is exactly what you want when you are clearing room for photos on the third day of a trip and still want something to play on the drive home.
If you are close to full on the phone, the order to free space in is films first, then audio, then photos. Films are the largest thing by a distance and the easiest to re-download later.
What this looks like as a habit
| Minute | Do this | Proof it worked |
|---|---|---|
| One | Offline map of the whole region | Scroll off screen in flight mode |
| Two | Albums plus one long audiobook or series | Play ten seconds offline |
| Three | Topic or deck set to audio, count raised | No missing-audio notice on the row |
| Four | A film each, tickets, addresses, chargers | Open one film in flight mode |
| Five | Flight mode and open all four | Nothing asks you to connect |
Do it for the other phones too
The prep usually happens on one adult's phone, and then that adult is the only person who can supply anything. Fifteen minutes of a nine-year-old's own downloaded music does more for the back seat than anything you can hand over from the front.
It is also worth deciding, out loud, which phone is the one running the game. Two people both trying to host produces a small argument at exactly the wrong moment.
The one thing to raise before a long empty stretch
If you know a section of the drive has nothing, mountains, a long tunnel run, a coastal road with the sea on one side and rock on the other, raise the saved question count before you set off rather than after. Saved questions are finite. Play through all of them and the app tells you that is everything it kept and asks you to reconnect, which is a fair message and a useless one when there is nothing to reconnect to.
One more limit worth knowing in advance: the microphone button needs a signal. Tapping it and saying which game to play, or naming a topic, or setting up a team, all go through a server. In a dead zone you pick from the screen instead, so it is worth choosing the game before the signal goes rather than after.
Five minutes against four hours
None of this is clever and that is rather the point. It is five minutes of dull preparation, done once, that decides whether four hours of a drive are the good part of the trip or the part everyone endures.
Do it on a Thursday evening for a Friday departure. Do it while the kettle boils. Then let the signal disappear, and be the one person in the car who does not mind.