Advanced Offline Functionality

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Enable advanced offline functionality to allow your app to function offline.

Configure Apps to Work Offline

Most clients these days are comfortable with the app requiring a network connection. But we also understand the desire for your app to work offline.

Previously, both Android and iOS platforms supported HTML5 Cache Manifest. However, this is now deprecated on iOS so it will only work on Android.

Service Workers

Service Workers have emerged as the new standard on the web that supports offline functionality. Basically, you implement Service Workers on your website to support offline access, and the same will work in your Median apps with the following caveats.

On Android, Service Workers should work out of the box with your Median app. For iOS, Service Worker support for WKWebView was only added in iOS 14, and only when using something called App Bound domains.

Here are the details:

https://dev.to/ben/will-ios-14-support-service-workers-in-wkwebview-5gn

https://webkit.org/blog/10882/app-bound-domains/

This is not an officially supported feature, so it is not supported out of the box. You may implement it in your iOS source code directly, or we can provide this support on iOS with custom development for a small fee.

In addition to Service Workers, we do have a premium add-on called Download Manager that works well for downloading specific files to be available offline. Please see our pricing page for more info.

We also have a solution OfflineSync that will work only if your app can work 100% offline without any network connectivity whatsoever, such as for a sales catalog, or an in-store kiosk display. Please email us if interested.