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by nmjenkins 294 days ago
Or you could … just build it directly on indexedDB. That's what we did for our offline support at Fastmail, with just a small wrapper function to make the API promise based: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-architecture/

The performance has been pretty decent, even with multi-gigabyte mailboxes.
2 comments
idle_zealot 294 days ago
The offline support has been great. I used to have to keep another mail app synced with my fastmail inbox over IMAP just in case I needed access to an email and had crappy connection. Now I can just have the one email icon on my homescreen.
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isaachinman 294 days ago
Saw that Fastmail released offline support recently, nice work!

Do you not have any need for CRDT?

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nmjenkins 294 days ago
No, CRDTs wouldn’t be useful right for what we currently do. If we ever wanted collaborative text editing for something then we’d use them for sure.
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isaachinman 292 days ago
Fair enough, not needing CRDTs makes life a lot easier!

And by the way, we didn't opt for an in-house IndexedDB solution because we have targets in which IndexedDB does not exist (mobile, desktop).

How do you handle offline-first in your mobile apps? Are your mobile apps webviews?

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