Signs it is time to revisit offline-first design
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A few signals that offline-first design is due some attention.
You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The signals
- Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
- The answer depends on who you ask
- Connections drop, and the app should keep working
- Conflict resolution is the part teams forget to design
What good looks like
Show sync state so people trust what they see. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What this looks like day to day
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
- Conflict resolution is the part teams forget to design — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.