[kingnight]

Mobile apps that are really online-only could do a lot better job though. The biggest examples would be to queue and store data to be posted and also to handle larger caches of downloaded info.

If ¥ou look at Instagram, it does not store much in the way of old photos in your feed, your old likes, or even older photos of your own profile. It's probably done in to part to simplify the experience, so you know the comments/like-count on photos are up-to-date, and it also keeps the app's footprint smaller. The percentage of time you are not connected and want to use Instagram is small, but it would be nice as disk space increases, to have more functionality available.

Apple's shared photostream is a good example of a similar use case (photos) where data is permanently cached and available offline ( to a degree) and you can still interact and 'post' to it where it'll wait and perform the action when network connectivity returns.