Offline data caching

Mobile apps have several benefits over web apps, one of which is the ability to operate offline and maintain offline data. There are a couple of reasons why offline data is important to a mobile app. First of all, you cannot guarantee your app will always have a network connection and the ability to directly connect to live data; so, supporting "offline" allows users to use the app, even if only for limited use cases, when they are operating with limited or no connectivity. Second, users expect mobile apps to offer high performance, specifically quick access to data without having to wait. By maintaining an offline cache, an app can present a user with data immediately while it's busy retrieving a fresh data set, providing perceived performance to the user. It is important that when the cache updates, the user receives that updated data automatically so that they are always seeing the latest data possible, depending on specific use cases of course.

There are several ways...