Offline
Offline, from the first field to the last
"Offline" means two very different things depending on the vendor: being able to look at a form you already opened, or being able to work a full day without a single bar of signal. Rondea does the second, and this page explains how.
15 days • 10 users • no card required
What happens on the phone
A local database, not a cache
The field app writes to an embedded SQLite database. The form, its display rules, its calculations, the reference lists and the submissions in progress all live there; the network is consulted to exchange, never to display.
- The form is embedded, not fetched on open
- A published version is pushed to the device and stays there. Opening a form at noon in an underground car park asks nothing of the network.
- Calculations run on the device
- Calculated fields, display conditions and conditional requirements are evaluated locally by the same engine the console uses. A total does not depend on a server round trip.
- Reference lists come along
- Customers, parts, equipment: lists are synced by difference and queried locally, even at a hundred thousand rows. Searching a list asks nothing of the network.
What happens when the network returns
Five states, and nothing disappears
A submission goes through draft, waiting to send, sending, sending photos, synced. These are not marketing metaphors: they are the values the protocol manipulates, and the technician's screen shows them as they are.
- Nothing is deleted without a user action
- It is a product rule, held by the protocol's own tests: no automatic purge, no queue expiry, no "we could not keep your entry" message.
- Media follow the submission, one at a time
- An interrupted photo resumes where it stopped. A drop costs the piece in flight, never the whole submission.
- A conflict is shown rather than resolved quietly
- When the same submission was changed on both sides, the device opens a conflict tray and asks. Overwriting without warning would be losing field data.
What to know before buying
What offline does not solve
Two limits that are otherwise discovered at the wrong moment, on site, with a customer watching.
- A delayed upload is still a delay
- If the crew spends three days without signal, the office waits three days. Assignments, deadlines and the daily summary exist to make that wait visible rather than endured.
- The phone must be stocked before it leaves
- The form version and the reference lists are synced while the device has signal. Publishing a form while the crew is already in a dead zone will not make it appear.
- The local database is encrypted; a phone is still a phone
- Storage is encrypted on the device, but an unlocked phone handed to someone is still an unlocked phone handed to someone. Screen locking and remote wipe belong to your device fleet.
How long can a submission wait on the phone?
With no limit set by the product. The queue does not empty itself and nothing in it expires; it is bounded by the device's disk space, not by a cleanup rule.
What if the form is republished while the field is filling it in?
Nothing for the submission in progress: it is attached to the version it was started with, and that version is immutable. The new version applies to later submissions.
Are photos compressed?
Capture quality is set per form. It is the trade-off that matters most in the field: a defect photo does not need the weight of a finish photo.
Try it where there is no signal
The best test of an offline product takes a minute: put the phone in airplane mode, fill everything in, and watch what arrives when it comes back.