Create An App That Works Without The Internet

Gone are those days when businesses were only targeting to make their application compatible to work with 4G or 5G technology. In this modern era, with the changing psychologies of the users, they want applications to perform even when they have no internet connection.

“According to Wired Magazine 2014, business mobile applications aren’t truly mobile if they can’t work offline on mobile devices. And surprisingly, organisations are spending a huge amount of time and cost to incorporate offline access to the business app.”

But before we get into the reasons why it is important to add offline access to your app and how it can be possible, many of you are curious to know how exactly it costs to add to your business app.

Let me reveal to you the real truth! With the collaboration of the right mobile app development company, business applications can be easily transformed with the best integrations without even disturbing the actual architecture of the app and with no incremental efforts and cost.

Let’s go a little deep with on-demand applications…

Offline mode can be a great competitive edge to your business especially when it comes to the on-demand applications with GPS navigations, apps for messaging, apps for medical assistance or banking apps. No matter how much your app is appreciated by the users, but a lack of offline functionality to your app can lead to app abandonment.

For instance, Applications like Whatsapp are only meant for communication but only work with an internet connection. But if there is no internet? Users can’t send the message without an internet connection. Thereby, offline apps will take the momentum and work when even your internet is not working and enables you to get connected. The integration of offline mode in your app will allow you to use the essential features of the app even if your connection is terminated.

So after spending so much time and cost on offline architectures for mobile app, if you are trying to understand how your app could behave offline, then this blog is going to serve you as a lightweight read.

• What’s The Need to Have Your App Working in Offline Mode?
• Understanding the Offline Mode Architecture
• How Does a Mobile Application Handle Functionalities In State of “No Connectivity”?
• Tips to Decide on Essential Offline features for your app
• Tutorial: How to make your application work without an internet connection?

— Step 1: Storing the Data For Offline Mode
- ServiceWorkers
- IndexedDB

— Step 2: Creating An Offline Storage in iOS and Android
- SharedPreferences For Android
- NSUserDefaults for iOS
- Local Storage (Internal/External)
- SQLite Database

— Step 3: Data Syncing
- Offline mode

Let’s discuss each point in details:

1. What’s The Need to Have Your App Working in Offline Mode?

Today, we are into the age where users are dependent on apps and vice versa. And one common thing between both scenarios is “Internet Connectivity”. The dependency of mobile apps on the internet restricts their access and makes it challenging for users to use them in different conditions and locations.

While it is true that 4.5 billion people are already connected to the internet and at the same time, you are neglecting the segment of users who have low or faulty connections. According to the survey, even in the USA 4.9 million homes can’t get wired access to connection speeds over 3 megabits per second.

And the section of the users accessing the internet is still susceptible to connection loss. Some factors that can affect the quality of the internet connection include:

• Extreme weather conditions
• Poor connection provider
• Outrange of power
• Travelling to the dead zones of the building will automatically block your network connection
• While users are in aeroplane mode
• No more data
• Travelling under the tunnel

Low or faulty mobile connections lead to slow loading on heavy sites like Amazon. And it is found that 100 milliseconds of extra load time cost them 1% of sales.

To overcome these situations, surely, businesses would prefer having offline access to their content. That’s why tools like Instapaper, Pocket exist, Spotify and Netflix

One simple way to deal with a network problem is by implementing offline support in the application. And the easiest way is to hire a mobile app developer for many businesses. But before that, you need to understand how it is going to benefit your business…

Building a Mobile App With Offline Support Means

• Getting an Edge Over Your Competitors: With the great expansion of mobile applications and their usage, they are dominating in all business verticals. Whether it be Facebook messenger and Whatsapp or Uber and Lyft, there are certain things of each app that attract users towards it. Some users look for UI design or the app, whereas the rest look for the performance of the app. But you would have better scope to win the market by providing access to mobile apps even in no-network areas.
• Better User Experience Even With No Connectivity: Poor connectivity will not only annoy users but also restrict users to access an app with no Wi-Fi connection. Adding offline mode to your app will ensure a better user experience and increasing user retention.
• No Roaming Expenses While Traveling: When travelling outside, there is no need of spending a huge amount on the data pack. The essential features of the app can be accessible even in offline mode
• Fast Loading Time: Offline mobile apps are not just advantageous for saving data or money but also come up with lots of features. They offer quick loading time even if the connection is poor.

So how would you go offline without muddling the existing architecture of your app? The simple way to deal with this situation is to hire a mobile app development company in Dallas that is backed by all the tools and holding expertise to fix the issues. But before it is important to understand the architecture of the offline mode and learn how things will be processed when there is no internet connectivity.

2. Understanding the Architecture of Offline Mode

App architecture? What it is…

Whether you are a CEO, product manager, hobbyist or even a developer, before implementing the offline mode to your app, it is worth going through this lightweight read that boils down the architecture of the offline apps into three broad categories:

Let’s begin with it!

Step 1: Data is stored offline when adding offline access to your app and there is no scope of data editing left for developers. For example, GPS data is stored offline temporarily in a food delivery app type.

Step 2: Users can edit their data offline and sync it online. A great example of this would be a note-taking app that allows you to edit the notes even if your phone is on offline mode. When your phone resumes to the network, it updates the information online and makes you see all the changes you’re made in offline mode.

Step 3: Users can edit shared data with other users even in the offline mode. Imagine making edits. The best example of this is making edits to an offline Google doc type app. The edits you make will not only reflect online but also can be passed to the other users with final edit permission.

3. How Does a Mobile Application Handle Functionalities In State of “No Connectivity”?

Undoubtedly, building an offline mobile app or choosing the offline capacity will permit people to get a convenient mobile app experience when the internet dies, working slow, flicker or low. But how your mobile app will handle functionalities in the state of “No Internet Connectivity” is one of the pressing questions among businesses.

While you can get the best answers from the mobile app development team but, to get familiar with the real-time possibilities, it is worth reading below. So here’s how mobile applications must handle extreme ends of quality spectrums in the following ways:

• When an internet network occurs, the app must present the user with a relevant error message.
• The application has the capability to automatically deal with network failures.
• The application must be able to provide some cache data so that in the case of an e-commerce application, “Cart Value” should not be lost in between.
• With offline access, the transaction of the app must continue seamlessly, even if the user closes the tab, and gets stuck due to the delay in response via online payment.
• The application must resume from where the user leaves the window.
• Due to the amazing feature of accessing the app in offline mode, users can further recommend your app to others.
• Users will have a great mobile experience even if they are not in a good network area.
• Customers can freely rely on the app with no specific condition.
• Effective medical services will be offered in rural areas where no internet connection is available.
• Offline app services will have entire control of the caching procedure.
• The entire procedure of data storage on the server requires a strong connection. Therefore, using an offline saving option, you can make changes when required.
• Further, you can manage and handle all your company activities with complete flexibility using an offline mobile app.

While making your app available for the offline mode, keep in mind that only limited features can work in this mode. So be careful about choosing the right features while making your app work without the internet.

4. Tips to Decide on Essential Offline Features for Your App

Now you must be wondering how to choose offline features while you have already built an application with the important ones only…

Tough job for you!

While there is no standard list of features or magic tricks to create the ideal offline mode for your app. So here is the formula to select the right offline features for your app.

• Understand Your Business Needs: Instead of randomly picking the features by following others, it is worth analyzing your workflow and translates them into app features.
• Prioritize The Features: Once you narrow down the features that your business can’t move without, then start prioritizing it according to the preference.
• Know Your Goals: Understand what exactly you are trying to achieve through your app.

Once you know the answers to these points, share this information with the mobile app development company in California to make them understand your business goals and explain the proper technologies for a well-tailored solution. Besides choosing the features for the offline mode of your app, the most important thing is to learn how to implement it. What tools and technologies are required to make your app work with no connectivity.

5. Tutorial: How to Make Your Application Work Without an Internet Connection?

To understand how to build a mobile app with an offline mode that works under different network scenarios, it is useful to know the key technologies that allow you to make an app that works offline.

So let’s have a look over a demo that explains at each stage, what are the common steps of making an app available for online mode and which technology you need to integrate. Let’s begin with it!

Before we start the game of building a mobile app with an offline mode that is capable of working under different network scenarios, it is important to understand the basic procedure of implementing the offline mode to your mobile and web app:

So here’s how to implement offline mode to your mobile or web app:

Step 1: Storing the Data For Offline Mode in Web and Mobile App

• ServiceWorkers
• IndexedDB

Step 2: Creating Offline Storage in iOS and Android

• SharedPreferences
• NSUserDefaults
• Local Storage (Internal/Eternal)
• SQLite Database

Step 3: Data Syncing

Let’s understand each step in-depth!

Before you start the process of implementing offline access, one always remembers that the whole game revolves around storing and synchronizing the data for both mobile and web apps. Let’s check out how to store and sync your data.

Step 1: Storing the Data Offline for Mobile and Web Apps

It is commonly known that web apps store data in the browser whereas mobile apps storing the data locally. So here are the primary tools that you can ask a mobile app development company in New York to access in the project.

Tool 1: ServiceWorkers

ServiceWorkers work as client-side proxies that take requests away from clients and offer a well-made lifecycle to storing the data to the app. But what if the browser is constantly making a request for data and there is no local storage or browser?

To make this work seamlessly, Google has made 2 amazing libraries “sw-toolbox” and “sw-precache” for caching dynamic and static content. Developers can use these libraries for applying your offline tactics.

Small Demo#(i)

• Start By Registering — — — — (i)

• As now ServiceWorker loaded, now use this command for installing…(ii)

• Since you are using the static assets URLs, now you can cache them immediately after installing the service worker by using Cache Storage.….. (iii)

• If a Cache request fails, then use this below command — — (iv)

The service worker Fetch event fires each time the browser makes a request for data. So with the new fetch handler, it has extra logic to return cached responses in the event of network failures.

Tool 2: IndexedDB

Generally offline applications use offline storage APIs to receive data and IndexedDB provides a perfect API than the Local Storage API to store data in the browser.

Keep in mind that your app is not making an HTTP call, so to avoid failing in offline conditions, browsers may clear IndexedDB in low-storage situations. To overcome this situation, you can utilize the persistent storage API.

Step 2: Creating Offline Storage in iOS and Android

There are a number of data storage methods to make an app working in offline mode, but you need to adopt different ways for both Android and iOS. Let’s learn.

Tool 1: SharedPreferences for Android

The Android Platform offers SharedPreferences APIs that can be accessed for saving a comparatively small amount of primitive data in key-value pairs. The value can be used for boolean, float, int, long or string, Android stores all SharedPreferences files as XML files in a private directory and makes your app run offline.

Tool 2: NSUserDefaults for iOS

To implement offline mode for an iOS app, you can use the NSUserDefaults class to save and update user’s preferences. The NSUserDefaults class delivers a programmable interface that allows an app to customize its behaviour according to a User’s Preferences. This is one of the most common methods used by Mobile app development teams while implementing offline accessibility to iOS devices. For example, by using this tool, you can allow users to save a profile image offline or include functionality that saves documents automatically.

Since this default system is accessible inside the app code, therefore every piece of data saved to it will continue across app sessions. If a user resets his/her device or closes the app, then in that case, he/she can still utilize the saved data for the next time he/she enters the app.

Tool 3: Local Storage (Internal/External)

When it comes to storing images, consecutive objects, JSON, XML or other files to the Phone’s file system, the SharedPreferences approach seems to be very restricted for developers.

Therefore, Internal or External data storage provides prompt data storage and is easy to use. To make your app run offline, make sure that every piece of stored data is utilizing the internal storage process that keeps your data private and secure to the application. Once the app is uninstalled, the data is removed from the device.

Tool 4: SQLite Database

Both iOS and Android and other major platforms provide support for apps to use SQLite databases for data storage, although database management is specific for each platform.

That’s where SQLite comes into the role. It’s an open-source database system that works great on mobile devices as its storage offers an app the speed and power of a full-featured relational database. To make the managing side simple, SQLite uses a single file to store all the data.

Apart, here is a simple list of code that shows you how to create a single table in the Android Platform.

Step 3: Data Syncing For Mobile Apps

When you use an application in offline mode, there is much data and actions that need to be synced with the server. The data synchronization usually occurs when an internet connection is accessible. User actions can be stored in IndexedDB for apps to sync the data.

As early as the network is accessible, these tasks can be processed. But using a mobile app you can have both server-side and client-side storage. Let’s have a look at the details of data syncing for mobile apps.

Offline Sync For Mobile App

With an offline app, users can take offline actions and then sync transformations using a central warehouse. To make this task possible, your app will require handling the data flow between the client and the server. In maximum cases, offline mode is utilized in situations when users can edit data on the mobile and server-side.

In most cases, clients hire app developers to develop offline applications assisting two-way sync, but it can be a complex method. In case you assist two-way sync, the logic of synchronization has to make sure that data is updated on the server and mobile sides at the same time.

While making your app ready for offline mode, it’s all about data storage and syncing. With these three steps, you will understand what tools are being used to perform the task. But again, proficiency in doing this task actually lies in the expertise of the development team.

Hire a Mobile App Development Team: Creating Tomorrow’s Innovation Today!

When it comes to making your app available offline, undoubtedly- data storing, storage and synchronization are playing a major role. But there are certainly other things to look for. The moment you start preparing your app for offline mode, here are the questions, that you may counter:

• What exactly do you need to have your apps in offline mode?
• Is it possible to completely build your app offline?
• What features you can avail for offline mode?
• What are the different types of offline applications?
• And, most importantly, what skills you need to create an app for offline mode?
• How much does it cost to make it work without the internet?
• How long will it take to develop?

If you really want to get the answers right from the expert’s point of view, then it is worth hiring mobile app developer skills and expertise in handling a variety of mobile app development projects. The right choice of the mobile app development team will help you make your app ready for offline mode within a quick time framework by leveraging the right technologies and tools.

Conclusion

With the internet connection undoubtedly, mobile apps are a true blessing. But what if there is no internet connectivity? To make your mobile apps really mobile, it is important to make it ready for offline mode. Since offline app support requires local storage, server availability, skills of the developers or device support, therefore it is worth hiring a mobile app development company in Chicago. They will create a mobile app on the better side of the spectrum that adds a competitive edge to your business.

Hopefully, this blog will help you understand all the parameters about making your app work without the internet. Also, we have added a small demo explaining how these tools are going to work without making you feel exhausted.