Apart from insufficient battery life, what’s the other big annoying thing about your smartphone? How about getting apps working without an internet connection.
That’s especially the case on those commutes underground. While some countries have wired up their subways, many places still don’t let you connect to the outside world when you’re deep underground. This is due to the fact that, to use apps like chat, banking, and streaming services, we need to communicate with cloud servers over an Internet connection.
Or do we?
Couchbase, a Mountain View, Calif.-based software company that makes data servers, is this Wednesday rolling out a mobile solution that will allow application developers to get pps working without Internet connection, by embedding a database and sync capability into their apps.
If it works –and the company says thousands of developers have downloaded its beta version– it could open the door for new and existing app developers to make apps that work without an Internet connection.
Today, mobile application developers build their apps with the assumption that they can’t store data on mobile phones. For an app like a music streaming service to work, that data must be stored on a server in the cloud and then pushed back to the phone. This means that when there is no Internet connectivity — like during underground subway travel — the app doesn’t work.
As such, the vast majority of mobile apps today don’t function when the app is offline, and most mobile phones can only store information collected by the device itself, like contacts and photos.
Couchbase’s “database-on-device” solution will allow the storage and synchronization of unstructured data — information not in numerical or tabular format of the sort found in spreadsheets. It’s the kind of data increasingly produced by mobile device apps like fitness apps, location mapping, and streaming music services.
The company says the Couchbase Lite mobile syncable database engine will let developers make apps that store data on consumer’s devices, and sync that data via its Couchbase Sync Gateway service — a bridge between the database on the device and the app’s server in the cloud. In essence, consumers would then be able to use their apps, to some extent, without an Internet connection. Live chat sessions wouldn’t work but activities like tagging, and adding and deleting photos on social media sites would work underground, without showing a “No Network Connection” error message.
App developers will be able to download the files they need to install Couchbase Lite from Couchbase’s website from Wednesday. The app is custom built for each of the major mobile operating systems, including iOS, Android and .NET for Windows phones.
“Our new mobile platform is designed to empower mobile app developers to easily build the next generation of mobile applications – apps that are not constrained by network availability,” said Bob Wierderhold, Couchbase CEO.
Couchbase recently signed a deal with Beats Electronic, the headphone maker and streaming music provider reportedly in acquisition talks with AppleAAPL +0.26%.
The deal would allow Beats’s streaming users to listen to music when not connected to the Internet. The company has also this year opened new offices in Paris and Tel Aviv.
And MicrosoftMSFT +1.69% is using the product to power Thali, a project designed to make the web peer-to-peer, said Jon Udell, an “Evangelist” at Microsoft.
Read more at blogs.wsj.com/apps-working-underground
