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Comment by BoumTAC | Hacker News Reader

what is your use case of offline ? I've never seen the point. For example what the purpose of a social offline app ? I can't refresh feed, I can't upload post or react to any thing in my feed.

The only use case I know is for map where you can download map so when you don't have 4G you will not be lost but that's the only use case I know.

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We made a pwa for our sales team. Globally they visit millions of stores everyday and more than 80% stores are in poor or no internet area at all.

They need to make sales order, survey, etc while offline and sync with our server whenever they get internet connection.

i'm currently thinking about building something similar - do you mind sharing more about what tech stack you used, esp. how you handled the offline data and syncing?

Was PouchDB / CouchDB used? I've found that it works marvelously for no-hassle syncing.

Sorry very late reply.

But yes we use pouch+couch to one way sync from our server to thousands device.

And from our sales force device to our server while we still save the data in pouch, we choose to use pwa's service worker to send directly to postgresql instead of pouchdb-couchdb sync.

Thanks for the reply. And I guess you do the service worker -> postgresql thing to avoid the database-per-user setup with pouch-couch 2-way sync?

Yes! I think it's hard for people in the 1st world to imagine that not everyone can get data whenever they want. In one country even YouTube added a feature for downloading and saving videos for offline viewing because they knew that internet was often slow or unreliable.

A dictionary that works offline (and updates when online), book-like educational reference apps that people can access when they don't have data or if they want to turn their data off to study and not be distracted by notifications. There are tons of things that people want to download/install on their phone as traditional apps, the PWA just makes it cross-platform and available for all.

Working on stuff, not communicating. e.g. Google docs, Photopea.

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