Offline first with Flutter

Christian Muehle
Flutter Community
Published in
7 min readNov 19, 2019

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Welcome to the 21st century where 5G, hotspots and mobile internet is available everywhere. It’s one of the things considered to be simply there, so you could ask yourself:

Offline first apps - is this really needed?

That’s a perfect valid question to ask — but think about it for a second and you might find yourself in the below examples and will agree it make sense.

Commute

You are in a high speed train or in the subway on an early monday morning (I know you don’t want to be in this situation but…) and your public transport app is not showing the next connection because you don't have a signal.

Travel

You made it — finally the time has come for your well-deserved holiday but unfortunately you do not have a stable internet connection or it’s way too expensive. No way to quickly check the map to get to that pizza place you checked out before.

Overload

70.000 other people are with you in a stadium watching the game of the year. And with them at least 70.000 other phones in a relatively small spot. Goodbye, mobile network...

Network coverage

Driving along the country side, hiking in a forest or simply going for walk…

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Christian Muehle
Flutter Community

Software developer in the marine industry — Technical writer and Flutter enthusiast — Happy user of Apache CouchDB and big fan of the .NET Framework