title: Offline iOS web app: loads my manifest, but doesn't work offline
body: <p>I'm writing a web app to be used offline on iOS.  I've created a manifest, am serving it up as <code>text/cache-manifest</code>, and it usually works fine, when running inside Safari.</p>
  
  <p>If I add it as an app to my home screen, then turn on Airplane mode, it can't open the app at all -- I get an error and it offers to close the app.  (I thought this was the entire purpose of an offline app!)</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>When I load the app a first time when online, I can see in my logs that it's requesting every page listed in the manifest.</p></li>
  <li><p>If I turn off Airplane mode, and load the app, I can see the first file it's requesting is my main.html file (which is both listed in the manifest, and has the <code>manifest=...</code> attribute).  It then requests the manifest, and all my other files, getting 200's for all (and 304's for anything requested a second time during this load).</p></li>
  <li><p>When I load the page in Chrome, and click around, the logs show the only thing it's trying to reach on the server is "/favicon.ico" (which is a 404, and which I don't think iOS Safari tries to load, anyway).  All of the files listed in the manifest are valid and served without error.</p></li>
  <li><p>The Chrome inspector lists, under "APPLICATION CACHE", all the cached files I've listed which I expect.  The entire set of files is about 50 KB, way under any limit on offline resources that I've found.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Is this supposed to work, i.e., am I supposed to be able to create an offline iOS app using only HTML/CSS/JS?  And where do I go about figuring out why it's failing to work offline?</p>
  
  <p>(Related but doesn't sound quite the same to me, since it's about Safari and not a standalone app: "<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4230748/cant-get-a-web-app-to-work-offline-on-ipod">Can't get a web app to work offline on iPod</a>")</p>