Can you hear me now?

 Do you expect your mobile apps to always have access to data?

How important is it for people out in the field to be able view and input information even when network connectivity is poor or non-existent?

With everything being in the cloud, micro-services architecture and designing for omni-channel, most data is stored somewhere on the cloud and accessed via api calls of some sort. This works until someone is trying to use a mobile application and network connectivity is not present. This could mean lost sales and lost opportunities.

The solution is usually to use a local db like sql lite or so that works on the platform and then build a sync functionality. Even though this sounds fine, the details are what will get you. There are a lot of details regarding sync, conflict resolution and many more things that will make this a lot more complicated that it appears.

That is why a solution such as Couchbase’s Lite DB along with sync gateway would be a better solution. It does most of the heavy lifting for all of the above woes and the mobile developers can focus on the core application functionality.

It is easy to over look this. Even though it appears like we are in a uber connected world, it is not all rosy as it seems. We can also see that the major cloud providers address the latency issue at least via the edge solutions.

In a world where our devices are more powerful than ever, delegating them to just be dumb terminals that fail without connectivity is shameful and we should implement robust solutions that continue working and is accessible everywhere.