A field app that works with no signal

Not from a store yet. Native apps for iPhone and Android are on the way and neither is listed, so what you install today is the web app: it goes to the home screen of any iPhone, Android phone or tablet and runs from there.

• It runs standalone once installed, without browser chrome.
• A subcontractor’s operative can be working in it in under a minute, with no store account and nothing for an IT department to approve.
• The iPhone app takes the same idea further. It keeps its own database on the phone and every save goes to a queue on the device, so nothing waits on a signal.
• When the apps are listed, the links appear in the footer of this site. Until they are, there is nothing on the App Store or Google Play to find.

Three things: the app loads, previously loaded data is readable, and everything you write is queued.

• The app shell is precached, so it loads and navigates on any route with no connection at all.
• Data requests go to the network first with a ten-second timeout, then fall back to the cached copy, so a flaky signal degrades instead of failing.
• The jobs list is served from cache instantly and refreshed in the background.
• Every create, update and delete you make offline is stored in the browser’s database and replayed when you reconnect. Reads are not queued, because there is nothing to replay.
• File uploads are queued too: photos are encoded into the queue rather than dropped.

NoteNothing is pre-downloaded. Offline reads depend on what you loaded while you still had signal, and there is no “download this job for offline” action yet.

It is retried up to five times and then held and counted, never discarded.

• A banner shows how many changes are queued, in red when offline and amber when online with work still pending.
• The queue is checked every five seconds and syncs automatically on a short debounce whenever you are online with anything pending, rather than only on an offline-to-online transition, because a flaky site signal never produces one.
• There is a manual sync button for when you want to watch it flush.
• After a successful sync the screens you were looking at refresh themselves.

A stripped-down, mobile-first area at /field with a five-item bottom bar: Today, Jobs, Diary, Hours and Defects.

• Per job, an operative gets RAMS, permits, photos and QA checklists.
• Defects, photos and QA checklists all tell you explicitly when something has been saved to the queue rather than sent.
• The offline banner is present in field mode as well as the main app, so a worker who never leaves /field still syncs.

QR site attendance, because it needs a live GPS fix and a server-side geofence and gate check at the moment of clock-on.

• The tab has to be open for the queue to flush. There is no background sync.
• Replay is last-write-wins against the server; there is no conflict resolution screen.
• There are no web push notifications.