Why Bloomffy is offline-first, not offline-eventually

Every childcare software pitch mentions offline support somewhere in the fine print. Most of it means 'the app doesn't crash if the wifi blips.' That's not the same thing as a nappy log actually surviving a ten-minute dead zone in the baby room.

We treated offline as the biggest real gap in this market, not a nice-to-have. Attendance, nap, nappy, meal, and daily-note logging all write to a local queue first — a Dexie-backed store on the tablet itself — with an optimistic UI update, then sync to the server the moment connectivity returns. The person logging never sees a spinner waiting on a network round trip; they see the log go in, and a small sync-status badge tells them whether it's actually landed yet.

It's not finished, and we'd rather say that than round it up. Observations, incident and accident reports, facility checks, and handover notes don't have offline support yet — they're the lower-volume logging types, but they're on the list, not ignored.

One real bug this design caught early: a background sync succeeding doesn't automatically refresh what's on screen. We found an actual duplicate attendance row from exactly that gap during testing, before it ever reached a real room — fixed by making the sync manager explicitly refresh the page once something actually lands. The kind of bug that only shows up when you build offline as a first-class case instead of an afterthought.