A Design Guide for Building Offline First Apps

The article discusses the challenges and architectures involved in designing robust offline first applications with good user-experience. Making an app offline first requires developers to design for offline first both on the front end and back end, including handling conflicts, migrations, and scenarios where something cannot be completely offline. Offline first is a development paradigm that ensures functionality of an app remains unaffected by intermittent lack of network connection. The article explores various existing approaches to making data available offline, such as versioning objects, using Conflict free replicated data types (CRDT), and shipping changes to the server while storing aggregates on the server. It also covers how to handle migrations and scenarios where certain features cannot be made completely offline. The article concludes by mentioning several frameworks and libraries available for building an offline first app, emphasizing that designing such applications is still challenging and requires careful planning.