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A field app is judged in a basement, a warehouse or a site office with one bar of signal. If the app assumes connectivity, the person stops using it and goes back to photographing things on their personal phone and sending them by message — which is exactly the problem it was bought to solve.

So offline is treated as a contract, not a feature: writes queue locally, sync is idempotent, conflicts resolve to a defined rule rather than last-writer-wins, and the queue survives a force-quit.

Offline-first means the local database is the source of truth for the person holding the device, and the server is something it reconciles with later. That is a different application from one that caches responses for convenience, and the difference is visible in the data model rather than in the network layer. Retrofitting it is close to a rewrite, which is why it is a decision taken at the start or not at all.

Conflict resolution is the part that gets deferred and should not be. Two people edit the same inspection, one of them offline for six hours, and something has to decide what the record says afterwards. Last-writer-wins is a legitimate answer for some fields and a data-loss bug for others, and the only wrong approach is not choosing.

Then there is the hardware the app actually runs on. Field devices are older than the developer’s phone, the battery has to last a shift, the camera is used constantly and photographs are the largest thing the app will ever sync. An upload strategy that assumes wifi turns into a mobile data bill somebody notices at the end of the month.

The stacks here are native iOS and Android, Flutter and React Native for shared codebases, and progressive web apps where installation is the obstacle rather than the capability. Which one is right depends on how much the app touches the device and how many people will maintain it, and it is worth deciding on those grounds rather than on preference.