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

Summary


In this chapter, we addressed some low-hanging fruit to improve the score of our to-do app. In addition, we took the scenarios from Chapter 1, The Pain of Being Offline and analyzed each against three criteria that affect a user's offline experience: connection speed, offline frequency, and device storage. No one strategy fits every user's needs, but knowing who your users are and what scenarios they experience can help inform the kind of caching that you implement.

In the next chapter, we'll look at ways to keep your data synchronized when you lack an Internet connection. Modern smartphones have a wide variety of network interfaces, including Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi. Let's see how we can keep our PouchDB databases synchronized using these interfaces.