I'm using Firebase+Ionic(AngularFire) to create a mobile iOs/Android app, and it works great. The only problem with using Firebase is that all the content in the app is being downloaded anew every time the user starts.
In an ideal world the app would save the Firebase-content to localStorage, and the next time the user starts the app, it would load from localStorage - and then simply "update" with Firebase to fetch the latest changes.
In other words we would load data locally and "resume" our Firebase-connection. Is this possible?
Note: Although we use AngularFire, the mobile app does not write data - it only reads from the Firebase.
On Android and iOS, Firebase supports disk persistence, which allows the cache to survive app restarts. This feature is currently not available for JavaScript environments, such as Ionic.
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I've built a music player app which automatically fetches songs from a server at start-up.
The issue is that, if I use NetworkImage to display the covers for the songs on an overview page, they are refetched everytime I leave the page and then return to it.
I already tried using CachedNetworkImage, but I don't want to store the song covers in the users cache. The images should persist for one session and then be disposed.
I could probably clear the cache everytime the user closes the app but there has to be a better way
You could try storing the images in memory while app is running, then dispose when app is closed.
Third party libraries such as flutter_cache_manager can help achieve this.
It allows persistence of images for app session's duration.
I'd like to create a flutter IOS app which stores data and allows to edit it within the iOS app.
Then the iOS app be able to provide a webserver [start an internal webserver e.g. using jaguar] and serve a WebApp, which operates on the same data on the iDevice.
Idea: Make the iDevice the only data store. And allow a e.g. windows client to access the data on the iOS device using a web interface [and not require it to push it into a cloud].
I have used Flutter jaguar to make it work, have you tried to run the example ?
I think what would be very challenging is that IOS kill background processes, so to use your IOS app as a (reliable) server in the background would be impossible (if reliability, and it should, is a concern), only audio streaming apps would not be killed. So it means you will have to run your server at all time in the foreground
And not to mention that if your phone is out of battery it would also stop working (but of course, you are aware of that, and that's true that if connect to charger, it could perfectly act as a server, as I have tested myself!).
NB: If it's for some serious project, not a fun personal project/challenge, I advise you to reconsider and what you could still do is to manage your server data from the IOS app (meaning that you would send data on on-premise or cloud server like Firebase). But as you stated in your question you are looking to make it work on the Iphone device.
I am developing an Android and iOS app that could be used in areas that have a very poor or no data connection. It is a requirement for the app to be pre-loaded with all of the data so it will work even if the app never communicated with the server, but it also needs to be able to update and sync when a connection is made. Is it possible to manually populate the AppSync (Apollo) cache database with data on launch and query and mutate it later? The app also contains several search and filter queries. Our backend API is currently using GraphQL.
I have seen this question, Is it possible to build offline-first mobile apps using AWS AppSync?, but it is a little different that what I'm asking.
The recommendation would be to hydrate (read: pre-load with data) a local SQLite database after install. SQLite is what the 'local cache' uses to persist data on the device.
Refer to this github issue for a code example of how to do this:
https://github.com/awslabs/aws-mobile-appsync-sdk-js/issues/160
I know that Firestone will store data if the user is offline and I saw that there is a way to do this with native code, but is it possible to enable these offline capabilities in flutter itself?
Firebase firestore support full offline. I’m using it myself. So long as you’ve read the data at least once before going offline. If using firebase authentication - the custom option also works offline. Google sign-in does not.
The downside to firebases offline capabilities is that it’s only firestore (not counting the older firebase db) and not the other products like cloud storage.
So for example I’ve written an app and the document side of it is fully offline enabled however you can take photos in the app and I had the write the offline capabilities to sync this photos with firebase cloud storage myself.
(I basically just keep them in a pending folder and try to sync them when the device has connectivity.)
I'm currently creating an iPhone app where in one part of my app you can view your twitter stream. I'm unsure if I need to ever save the twitter information to a sqlite database or not.
So here is the flow of this part of the app:
press button to see twitter stream
go get twitter stream
display twitter stream in table view
I'm wondering if I should ever save the twitter stream into a database. Any advice?
I would say you should save the twitter stream. You should almost always try to save some application state in an iPhone app. This way, if the user is interrupted (a phone call) they can jump back into your app without missing a beat.
There are a few different ways to persist data in an iPhone app. Instead of bothering with using a SQLite database you will almost certainly want to use Core Data, which is new in iPhone OS 3.0
If you won't ask the user to provide his/her twitter credentials and it will be an anonymous stream, you don't need to store anything.
But the minute you want to store some preferences, actual state (to show the user what he/she was seeing when a phone call came or after application restart) you will need to store persistent data.
I think it's important to cache web data. With a cache, you can present data immediately on app startup - this is important on the iPhone OS because users are constantly opening and closing apps. Having your data immediately available is a big win for the user.
You can make the caching very simple, just have a single table with the URL as one column and the HTTP response as a second. Then you don't have to change any of your code to make the caching happen.
Alternatively, you will need to define a data model and manage that through CoreData or sqlite.