I am working on a web application that allows offline usage by caching everything in the manifest file. I am running into a few problems I hope you can help me with. The problem is that the webapp is very buggy when I add it to homescreen. The problems are: Sometimes it wont show anything and it tells me to turn on wifi (I test in airplane mode). This seems to be happening randomly. Usually it works if I close the app, connect to the internet, restart the app, and then go to airplane mode. Sometimes not the entire code is loaded and its all messed up. Rebooting the app always works in this case. Sometimes there is missing content. First I thought it was simply not done caching everything before I went to airplane mode. But I already experienced a situation where it worked at first, but closing and restarting the app would make the content unavailable. Its a real pain to debug since it only occurs when adding the webapp to homescreen and you can't really debug in webapp mode (as far as I know, tips welcome!). I have tested offline mode in firefox, chrome and on safari mobile (without adding it to homescreen) and there are no problems there. By the way, I am testing all this on an iPad 1 with iOS 5 and the webapp is using jquery mobile. iOS 4 has been tested aswell and gave me the same problems, tho it seems to be a little bit better on iOS 5. The webapp always works as it should when connected to the internet so the problem is with the caching. Any ideas anyone? Or maybe tips on how to debug in webapp mode?

Reputation: 315

Webapp caching iOS

I am working on a web application that allows offline usage by caching everything in the manifest file. I am running into a few problems I hope you can help me with.

The problem is that the webapp is very buggy when I add it to homescreen. The problems are:

Sometimes it wont show anything and it tells me to turn on wifi (I test in airplane mode). This seems to be happening randomly. Usually it works if I close the app, connect to the internet, restart the app, and then go to airplane mode.
Sometimes not the entire code is loaded and its all messed up. Rebooting the app always works in this case.
Sometimes there is missing content. First I thought it was simply not done caching everything before I went to airplane mode. But I already experienced a situation where it worked at first, but closing and restarting the app would make the content unavailable.

Its a real pain to debug since it only occurs when adding the webapp to homescreen and you can't really debug in webapp mode (as far as I know, tips welcome!). I have tested offline mode in firefox, chrome and on safari mobile (without adding it to homescreen) and there are no problems there.

By the way, I am testing all this on an iPad 1 with iOS 5 and the webapp is using jquery mobile. iOS 4 has been tested aswell and gave me the same problems, tho it seems to be a little bit better on iOS 5. The webapp always works as it should when connected to the internet so the problem is with the caching.

Any ideas anyone? Or maybe tips on how to debug in webapp mode?

Upvotes: 0