Hi. New to Glide, and making great progress. But I have hit a problem.
I have built a project, opened the resulting site on my phone and saved it to my Home Screen. Naturally, it doesn’t work offline. The support bot has given me conflicting answers about the offline possibilities. The documentation includes the following:
Offine Mode
Use apps offline
Glide Apps can partially run offline. When a Glide App no longer has access to the internet, it will show a banner at the top of the app. Actions and functionality like adding rows are also disabled.
I can find no further guidance. So: can I build apps that work offline?
I have also read some threads here about apps being a legacy thing, and everything moving to pages projects. Strikes me there is a lot of confusion in this area.
cheers, Chris
This bot message replicates one of the responses I got via the chat system earlier. When I phrased my question differently, I got the opposite response: No, Glide doesn’t do offline apps; use another platform if that’s what you want
C
Think of it this way. When you are connected to the internet and open the app, it performs a sync to download all of the data to your device into a temporary cache that only exists while the app is open. Also, the data does not store images, but rather the url to the image. Those images are only downloaded and stored in your cache when they need to be displayed in your app.
Now the offline capability comes into play if you already have the app open, because much of the data is already cached on your device. If you temporarily lose internet, the app won’t shut down, but rather it will continue to run…but it can only work with the data that was cached prior to going offline. Although, every time you open the app fresh, it needs to perform this initial synchronization. If there is no connection, then it can’t retrieve data and won’t open.
If you have a business plan or higher, you do get the added ability to add rows while offline, but you cannot edit any existing data because eventually it has to synchronize Glide’s copy of the data (and any third party data source) and if things change before the connection is restored, your data could get out of sync.
First and foremost, these are web apps. Key word…web. Web apps run on top of a web browser…even when “installed”. You may get partial functionality if you temporarily lose internet while using the app, but for the most part, a connection is required to have full functionality.
Regarding this…Glide has two products. Apps and Pages. Glide is in a long term process of phasing out Apps and migrating to Pages. Long story short, Pages will become the only product, but will also be better and more capable than the current iteration of Apps. Apps in their current state will not receive additional improvements, while Pages will continue to evolve. Eventually Apps will merge into Pages, and the Page name will become Apps.
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Hi hi
We are also working on a similar function. We have an IOS app that takes in attendance records, push it to our destination which is a google sheet via API. From there update to Glide table which is also reading from GS.
Whenever the IOS app is offline, it will store in the ipad device, and pushes the records to GS once online.
Hope this idea works for you.
Thanks for the responses.
I’m familiar with the concept of a web app, and the concept of saving any web page to the Home Screen of my phone as if it were an app. I think what confused me was the widespread use of the simple term ‘app’ in the Glide docs; I jumped to the conclusion that the system allowed generation of an app that retained data even when not in use.
In my case, the Map component is central to my project, and for that to work properly internet access is necessary. Should have thought of that.
cheers
Chris
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