Facing a fundamental decision while looking to build a web app for small farms — pretty much a typical SAAS database app but with a non-traditional, more interactive UI. The problem is that a lot of these farms have terrible Internet connectivity (just check out this report!). Eventually, the app will go international where connectivity is possibly even worse.

I really love Elixir, Phoenix and especially LiveView. I’ve built some test apps, and tried them both using bad cellphone connections and with browser latency/speed limits. The efficiency of LiveView on the wire goes a long way but if the signal drops, the user is really stuck.

Looking for alternatives, the most viable option seems writing a Vue app that interacts with Firebase. Firestore has good data caching and even stores writes while offline locally (reflecting them back to your app) while re-syncing as soon as the Internet connection is back. To build an occasionally-offline app, it seems like this would be ideal, but I feel very suspicious about that beyond a simplistic CRUD example. It’s the opposite of the elegance of LiveView.

Phoenix (either LiveView or old-fashioned HTML with minimal JS) provides a single source of truth with everything always in sync, plus so many other advantages that make the app more robust and easier to develop. No wonder the forums here exude developer satisfaction.

Another possible solution may consist of both:

1. To deal with poor connection, minimize LiveView trips, so don’t use it on every keystroke, or in simple interactions like clicking a different tab or a menu.
2. To deal with no connection, embed an almost entirely separate “offline” version of the app that looks the same but is merely a read-only version snapshot with the most recent data (which would have to be refreshed periodically).

Both would several reduce the elegance and speed of LiveView, but maybe there could be generalized way to implement this so it doesn’t need lots of extra code for every feature.

Am I overthinking this? Or wishing for something impossible? Or is there a way to make this work?

Thank you!