Can you imagine your life without a smartphone? The answer is no because the evolution of smartphones and their applications has instilled deeply in our daily lives. Would have it been possible just a decade ago? A huge share of contributions to build hybrid applications.
Apart from smartphones, the evolution of other items such as tablets, smartwatches, headphones, etc. has also come into the picture. Thus, building a hybrid application that seamlessly fits in every environment has become crucial.
Therefore, the demand for hybrid applications is definitely going to increase in the upcoming years. In this blog, we will learn about the best practices for building hybrid apps with offline data synchronization.
How Offline Data Synchronization Will Be Helpful for Users?
So, before we step into the details, let’s have a brief idea of why synchronization is the best idea. Offline data synchronization for hybrid applications drastically reduces frustration and also eradicates issues regarding data security.
Following are some essential fields where mobile apps with offline data synchronization can prove to be helpful.
Healthcare Applications– Offline synchronizations for healthcare apps will allow easy access to critical information, medical data, and other medical history.
Sales Applications– Sales representatives working in the field also need constructed network connections. That’s why offline access to the apps will help them get through product catalogs and customer information with great ease.
Educational Applications– These apps can easily provide essential study materials and textbooks for students who may face problems with internet connection.
Tourism and Travel Applications– Visiting new places, especially rural or remote areas will not guarantee a reliable network connection. Having an app with offline synchronization will make the task easy to access the details for booking, restaurants, itineraries, etc.
Hence, there is a wide range of industries that software development companies are expected to experiment with for offline data synchronization. Let’s have a look at the below on essential practices.
Best Practices to Build Hybrid Applications with Offline Synchronization
Creating hybrid applications with offline synchronization requires extensive and careful planning to ensure a reliable user experience. Keep the following Practices in mind for designing hybrid applications.
Data Synchronization
Data synchronization is an essential part of building hybrid applications with offline capabilities. This process consists in keeping consistent data among local devices, and remote servers.
Issues can arise when the data is modified on the server as well as locally while offline. To prevent that, focus on implementing mechanisms for seamless data transmission between the server and the client.
Also, testing the network interruptions, conflicts, server downtime, etc. for data synchronization is essential to ensure consistent and reliable data exchange. You must provide clear guidance to the users to solve these issues.
Identifying Essential Functionalities
The first step to identifying the crucial functionalities in creating hybrid applications with offline data synchronization is evaluating and determining the essential features for offline and online modes.
Document the available features offline along with the limitations you expect that users may encounter. Start by considering how the application will handle the errors when the device is turned offline.
It will make your task easier to find those features which may not be important for offline use. Or, it may become entirely or partially available during offline mode. But, you have to ensure that the app provides an effective experience.
Let’s take an example of a banking app where you can transfer funds offline. Moreover, the transaction will only occur when the device gets internet connectivity.
Also, the team needs to provide relevant feedback regularly for essential improvements. For building an app for task management, take utmost care to sync every change in the server.
Handling Errors and Conflicts
The chance of risks and synchronization will increase with the rise of users. Thus, proper management of these errors becomes essential for building hybrid apps with offline synchronization.
A real-time feedback mechanism will enable your team to inform errors instantly such as notifications, messages, status indicators, etc. Software development companies must maintain a queue for failed synchronization being offline.
Utilize analytics tools to find root causes of synchronization errors. Also, provides a user-friendly interface to make essential decisions for conflicting data. In this way, you can ensure that your application is reliable and user-friendly for offline and online environments.
Implementation of Effective Caching
Caching enables you to store access data which are locally stored on your device. Apart from improving performance, it also ensures that the app works the same without the internet.
Focus on particular data that are frequently essential and accessible for the application’s offline functionality. Thus, cache management also helps in controlling the expiration and storage of the cached data.
Factors like cache expiration, cache size, and cache eviction, should be kept in mind while working on hybrid apps. Make a routine to check the server regularly for advanced caching.
Encrypting cached data is crucial to improve security for sensitive data. Extra protective layer to prevent unauthorized access. Also, setting up server-side clients or webhooks to notify the changes to the server.
So, always optimize and monitor performance regarding cache operations and minimize latency while fetching data from hybrid applications.
Local Data Storage
Document the implementation of local storage for hybrid apps. Include necessary guidelines for the developers for effective management of the data. Also, you may need to implement security measures according to the data.
For effectively storing complex data, it is essential to deserialize and serialize data from the local format. Hence, ensure that you have the right set of tools and handle serialization and deserialization of data.
Popular hybrid app platforms such as Apache Cordova provide access to the file system of the device. It will allow the developers to work with the store data and files in a file-based format to manage larger files, images, and documents.
Another hybrid app such as SQLite databases for advanced querying capabilities and data storage. Its relational database can be used for managing structured data. Hence, proper management and security of local data storage is important to ensure the integrity and reliability of hybrid apps with offline synchronization.
Security
Security is a major concern when it comes to building hybrid apps with offline synchronization. Robust user robotic user authentication before performing critical actions. Authentication with encryption keys to secure key management practices. It’s best to avoid hardcoding keys in the code.
You also need to ensure that users can access data both offline and online. Integrating token-based authentication or other methods to verify user identity even without an internet connection.
However, the best thing to do is develop a response plan to handle security incidents. It will foster early detection to mitigate any security breach. Along with that, provide guidance to the users about implementing best practices to secure data.
Take crucial steps like creating passwords, biometric authentication, etc. for users to protect critical user data. Remember that security for hybrid applications with offline synchronization is a continuous process and requires proactiveness and addressing of potential threats and vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, building hybrid applications with offline synchronization requires strong commitment and detailed planning for data security. Thus, by implementing the above practices, software development companies in India can create hybrid applications resilient to vulnerabilities with a user-centric approach.
Thus, comprehensive testing and a strong commitment to efficient integration will help you achieve success in creating hybrid apps.