Offline support for mobile applications can be thought of as the ability for the application to react gracefully to the lack of stability of the network connection. The rather new context of mobile devices introduced problems such as presence or absence of a network connection or even high latency and low bandwidth. These problems are rather new and thus not very well known to engineers starting with mobile development. Among other things building a mobile application which resilient to different network scenarios could mean:

– Displaying comprehensive error messages when network calls fail.
– Allowing the use of the application in “guest mode”, where certain features can be delayed until the user actually signs in.
– Visually displaying the absence of network connectivity on the UI (connected mode/offline mode).

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