This paper describes the issues encountered when developing user interfaces for collaborative multimedia applications designed for operation in unreliable mobile networking environments. To provide end-users with some degree of dependability applications need to provide increased levels of user-awareness in order to enable users to adapt their style of interaction to match the current quality of communications. The application described in this paper achieves this by presenting users with graphical feedback when the constraints imposed by the network violate the collaborating groups' various communications requirements. Because traditional distributed development platforms tend to mask detailed network information from reaching the application the development platform was enhanced to enable the flow of information between the network and application level services and vice versa.