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The Farce of 'Offline Software'

By Joe R. •

We just wrapped another great webinar where vendors were sharing the successes and challenges of dealing with live markets, and one common frustration that is continually voiced is INTERNET ACCESS! Whether it be wide-open fields with poor cell coverage or buildings that act as a faraday cage, dealing with poor internet connections is a constant source of frustration. Given that, it is no surprise that a new slew of software is being introduced touting that it works offline. There’s just one problem:

IT’S NOT REAL.

I’m not going to suggest that this is an intentional misrepresentation by any of the software developers that are making these claims. In fact, there are some small situations where it might work. However, the funny thing about the Laws of Physics is that they are unbreakable.

The simple explanation: customers don’t actually have their photos on their phone. They only have tiny thumbnails of their photos; the real photos are stored in the cloud.

[The technical explanation] (feel free to skip this): all major smartphones utilize a tech called hierarchical storage management (HSM), more commonly marketed as “Optimize Storage” on iPhone or “Storage saver” on Android. Here’s what’s actually happening on your customer’s phone. When they open their Photos app and scroll through what looks like 12,000 vacation pictures, they’re really looking at low-resolution placeholder files (sometimes called stub files) that the operating system has cached locally. The full-resolution originals, the ones you actually need for a 300 DPI print on a 2”x3” magnet, live in iCloud or Google Photos servers far away. When an app requests one of those photos to share with you, iOS uses an API called PhotoKit to quietly reach out to Apple’s servers, download the original, and hand it to the app.

[End technical explanation]

The customer never sees this happen. It just works when there’s internet. It’s how modern phones are designed to work. Apple and Google decided years ago that nobody’s 128GB phone can hold a decade of 4K photos and videos, so they invented HSM to make it look like it does.

Now here’s where the “offline” claims fall apart. When a customer tries to give you their photos in an internet dead-zone, iOS reaches for iCloud to fetch it. If there’s no connection, it just fails. The request hangs, times out, or returns an error. Your customer stands there confused while the app spins, and you’re left explaining why their photo of their granddaughter in an Easter bonnet won’t load on your ‘offline’ software.

This isn’t a software bug anyone can engineer around and it isn’t something that incumbent software developers didn’t think about. So if a vendor is telling you their app works fully offline, ask them one question: “Where do my customer’s full-resolution photos actually live, and what happens when you can’t reach them?” If the answer isn’t a clear, technical explanation of how they broke the laws of physics, they either don’t understand their own product or they’re counting on you not to push.

We built Gridget online-first because we looked at this problem honestly and decided we’d rather tell vendors the truth than ship a feature that only works some of the time. Internet connectivity either exists, or it doesn’t.