Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By : Daniel Sauble
Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By: Daniel Sauble

Overview of this book

When building mobile apps, it’s easy to forget about the moments when your users lack a good Internet connection. Put your phone in airplane mode, open a few popular apps, and you’ll quickly see how they handle being offline. From Twitter to Pinterest to Apple Maps, some apps might handle being offline better—but very few do it well. A poor offline experience will result in frustrated users who will abandon your app, or worse, turn to your competitor’s apps Expert or novice, this book will teach you everything you need to know about designing and building a rigorous offline app experience. By putting the offline experience first, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon, avoiding the unnecessary stress and frustration of trying to retrofit offline capabilities into your finished app. This basic principle, designing for the worst-case scenario, could save you countless hours of wasted effort.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Offline First Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Be Honest about What's Happening

In the last chapter, we put our fledgling app online. Currently, it's a bit tone-deaf. We don't communicate anything that's happening under the hood so there's a lot of is it working? I really hope it's working. We also don't attempt to compensate for bad network connectivity. In this chapter, we'll address both of these concerns.

A lot of what differentiates a bad offline experience from a good offline experience is the way an app communicates with people. With two functionally-equivalent apps, the one that comes across as most transparent and honest will win every time. This is particularly important in a first impression scenario. Over time, you may learn to accommodate an app's quirks and foibles, but if people don't stick around after their first bad experience, you've lost.

Fortunately, PouchDB gives us a lot of information about what's happening. We've ignored these events thus far, but in this chapter, we'll be able to pass this information...