Offline vs Online - why you should build your app to work when it’s offline

Online data capture has become the norm for many businesses. We often find ourselves using websites or apps to perform many business tasks. As convenient as online data capture is, it also comes with one very niggly challenge; you have to be online. As we all know after one drive out of town, those three little mobile coverage bars often go to zero and we have to deal with the reality that we still don’t have 100% data coverage everywhere.

If your app requires the internet, then even if your team has internet access 99% of the time, the other 1% will require a paper alternative. This means your old manual processes can never be fully replaced. You may think you’ll never need it, or maybe you didn’t realise it was even possible, but you can build apps that work offline and sync back to the server later when the internet is available.

In many cases we recommend building your apps to work offline, here’s why:

1. Enhanced Accessibility
   Offline data capture allows you to collect data in areas with limited or no internet access. This can be especially important if you're working in remote areas where internet connectivity is limited. Even in urban areas, internet access may be limited. Hospitals, for example, have stock and inventory rooms well underground away from mobile coverage; they also forbid unauthorised visitors from accessing their Wifi. Our client found their sales team were not using their new app to record inventory when visiting hospitals across the US simply because they had no coverage when doing a stocktake. In the basement, the app was a brick, a useless lump of aluminium and glass. But it didn’t need to be so.

2. Increased Reliability
   Oftentimes, slow internet is worse than no internet. In this case, your app thinks it’s communicating to the server when actually it’s not. The data looks like it’s sent when it isn’t, and more often than not it’s lost or corrupted. This is worse than not being able to send it at all. It causes delays, no one notices it’s an issue at first, and often you get weird processing errors which are super hard to diagnose. Collecting data offline means you can reduce the risk of these issues and ensure that your data collection process remains reliable and efficient.

3. No Data loss & better user experience
   When you collect data online, you run the risk of losing the data if the connection drops or the device crashes. This can be frustrating for users, as they retype all the work they just lost. With offline data capture, users can continue to collect data even if the connection drops, ensuring that their data is never lost. It’s all saved on its local onboard database. Your team trusts their app a lot more when they don’t lose data all the time, which massively improves adoption and uptake.

4. Superfast Performance
   Everyone loves a snappy app. When retrieving data or sharing data with a remote server, network latency and other factors such as network speed and congestion can reduce the performance of your app. With offline data collection, the app can quickly access the data stored locally on the device, resulting in faster overall performance and allowing your team to get in and out of the app and complete tasks as quickly as possible.

5. Your iPad works like a paper pad
   With offline access, you can keep a ruggedised iPad in the back of your truck, pick it up at any time, enter some data, travel to the next location, add some more data, and it will save all your work. You can keep doing it all day if you like, with no internet access and it will sort it out later when you come back to civilisation.  This means your iPad actually behaves like a pen and paper. Pick it up, scribble, and go back to work, no worries!

6. Cost savings and Security
   Offline apps use local storage. This means hard disk. If you’re using a hard disk on a phone that belongs to your employees, they don’t appreciate it much.  Staff bringing their own device to work might seem like a cost-saving, but often it’s a false economy. The productivity afforded by good easy-to-use offline apps shared across multiple team members means many of our clients get huge returns on investment even when purchasing a fleet of devices for use by their teams.
   

   Security is better managed as you own and control all the devices. Maintenance and upgrades are massively easier to handle as your apps don’t need to support every phone known to man. You’re in control and when your apps are truly saving people time, when your data is moving swiftly around your business, then the savings add up.
   

   Offline data capture is not all beer and skittles; it’s easier to use but harder to build.

   
   Offline apps store the data locally on the device and sync with the server later when the internet is available.
   
   Here are some important considerations that need to be well thought through:
   
   Shared devices
   If your team are sharing devices, each capturing data offline, then the sync function has to know whose logging the data and when. The sync function must understand each user’s role and permissions and sync the data according to each user and security policies.
   
   One-way (vs) two-way sync
   An app that syncs to a server is a different kettle of fish from two completely different apps syncing and sharing data. In the latter case, we call it two-way sync, and it requires two different users in different departments with different apps sharing common data sets between them. When it works it's amazing, your data is moving between departments seamlessly, saving time and duplication. When you also want this to work offline, tread deliberately and carefully, it can get very complex.
   
   Notifications and alerts
   It’s important your users are clear of the sync status and notified when their app changes state and moves between online/offline, synced/not synced, up-to-date/not up-to-date. It will save a lot of calls to your call centre or help desk if your app makes it clear what state it’s in.
   
   Use the technical design phase to work out how you’ll sync your data against each profile and make it simple for users to switch between profiles and apps while ensuring the data is in sync.
   
   Building your app for offline data capture has many benefits. The team at UiRev has a 20-year working relationship across design and development that is focused on solving problems, not simply building apps. With a digital design process built to last, we’ve got the practices and technical nous to get something into the hands of users – helping your business achieve great things.
   
   Ready to create a digital product that truly delivers? Get in touch with us today to find out more.