Droidcon India 2013

Offline support for a mobile app nowadays has become an implicit expectaion. With lot of apps allowing users to do things, without thinking whether they are connected to the network, have intermittent or no network connection. This happens to most of us while traveling or in some areas which have sparse connectivity. Users would still expect the app to not throw them out completely, instead allow them to do things normally and let the app intelligently handle network related stuff when they are back online.

The talk will be focusing more on architecture of a system which can adapt to offline or online and talks about key components which you should think of when designing an app which doesnt die with no network.

Outline

There are couple of things which come to our mind, when we start thinking about making an app work in offline mode.

• How do we keep the data consistent

• How do we handle stale data

• What is the frequency when we should sync the data.

• What type of data and how much of data do we cache

• Is there a threshold on how long can he be offline ( for critical transactional application)

• How do we handle conflicts for multi edits on the same entity – Conflict resolution

• How do we keep track of audit trails for business applications

We will be sharing our learnings and the key components and workflows to keep in mind to enable an app to work offline.

Speaker bio

Working in Intuit as a Mobile developer developing Android apps.