Offline-First Apps: Why Should Apps Be Made to Work in an Offline State?
My startup built an SDK framework that’s allows companies to build offline apps that can even sync over a multihop mesh network. It’s powered by a CRDT to handle the conflict resolution.<p>From my experience most of our customers are not mobile developers (they’re JavaScript developers asked by their bosses to build mobile apps) and don’t even want to spend time learning coredata or room for iOS or Android. So most of the time they just stick to what they know, HTTP requests.<p>Luckily we made our SDK easy to use so that these JavaScript developers can get both the network communication and the offline first caching in one product. They absolutely love it.<p>Most apps aren’t offline first because it’s so hard to build the infrastructure to pull it off without a lot of bugs. Most apps focus entirely on the UI code layer. If infrastructure and frameworks made this a lot easier to use, I bet offline first would be a lot more popular and users would be a lot happier.