Before you invest in offline-first design
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Before you spend anything on offline-first design, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.
Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Prerequisites
- You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
- Someone owns it after the work is done
- Connections drop, and the app should keep working
- You have a way to tell whether it worked
Warning signs
Conflict resolution is the part teams forget to design. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Show sync state so people trust what they see. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The short version
The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. Three things worth confirming about offline-first design before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Connections drop, and the app should keep working — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.