No Offline Web

Offline has always been a tricky. But many apps claim to support offline mode and some are even created with the sole purpose to offer offline experience. But the truth is with offline... your mileage may vary...

YouTube (premium) usually works except sometimes to start a downloaded clip it wants to check something online.

Same with Spotify. Has the download feature but sometimes refuses to play downloaded content.

Then there is Pocket. Created with the goal to deliver offline reading. I have been using Pocket (paid) for many years and it is super picky. Some "pocketed" web pages it renders properly but majority it does not. On the surface pocketing web pages for offline reading does not seem like a rocket science. Yes the page must be rendered first, but hey, rendering a page is one of the most executed task on any computing platform. Regardless of how much server code is involved and regardless of how much client-side scripts there are, in the end there is a human-readable page available. That is what web browsers do.

I clearly must be missing something, as to me it seems the task of "pocketing" a page is just storing the rendered content and then making it available for viewing. But somehow Pocket (despite being owned by Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-pocket/) just cannot do this. I'd say my success rate is somewhere around 20%. Meaning 80% of pages I "pocket", are not viewable when the Internet connection is not available.

I was living with the quirks of Pocket for many years but it seems with no real progress in making its core feature more usable, it is time to look around for alternatives. The shame is Pocket has native integration with Feedly, which is my everyday go-to app for browsing the subscribed RSS feeds. But what good it is if I mark an number of news items for later reading, board a flight and the items are not available for offline reading. This does not seem such a rare use case and if Pocket truly cannot do that, it must be an opportunity / niche somebody wanted to fill.

BTW speaking about an offline experience, I must say I need to apologize Gaia GPS. I was complaining about its offline experience, hinting a switch to Fatmap (by Strava). While Fatmap still offers a great experience, it turns out its weakness is downloading larger map areas. On my last month's trip to New Zealand I realized it was unmanageable to download the entire Southern Island for offline usage in Fatmap. Simply the areas I was allowing for selection were too small. Gaia, on the other hand, managed to cover New Zealand South in only two download segments. The truth is it took about 10 hours to download (and the Internet speed was not the issue), but once downloaded we were able to use the super high resolution topo maps without any Internet, anywhere. So it looks like I will be extending my Gaia subscription.