Lie-fi
It is an expression to describe a WiFi network that seems to to be available but won’t connect, or that connects but won’t provide anything.
That is when your phone or tablet indicates that you are connected to a wireless network, however you are still unable to load webpages or use any internet services with your device due to network or connectivity issues.
Connectivity Issues
There are many causes to either slowing down or preventing users from receiving data from your website/app, such as poor signal, a misconfigured proxy, fault in the mobile network, busy network, server being DDOSed, bug in server code, WiFi captive portal, etc.
Online First
It is the way we typically have been approaching development.
Online-first steps
- Try getting data from the network first.
- If network was unavailable, serve offline data (e.g. cache content, fancy error page, etc.)
This way our app will work well in good connectivity and offline. However, in lie-fi it will just linger and linger on.
Offline First
This means getting as much of the content as possible using stuff already on the user’s device (e.g. in cache). We will still go to the network for data, but we’re not going to wait for it.
Offline-first steps
- First, deliver the last saved offline data.
- Try getting data from the network once it is available.
- Update the page if we finally get data from the network.
- Finally, save that new data on the user’s device.