Offline-first: the real cost, one year in

The spec-sheet mirage

When I started Ficelle, “offline-first” ticked every box of the seductive project…

What actually costs

1. Conflict resolution: 80% of cases are trivial; the remaining 20% are your new job.
2. Local schema migrations: every release must migrate IndexedDB on the client.
3. Debugging: reproducing a divergent sync state is a dark art.

If your app can show a spinner, show a spinner.

The rest goes through each point with code samples…