Turbo Native + offline-first strategies with Workbox

I still remember the knot in my stomach as we watched the demo. We were standing in a converted barn in rural Vermont, holding our iPads up to show the client their brand‑new field service app. The barn had beautiful wooden beams, a lot of charm, and exactly zero bars of cellular signal. The app, a sleek Turbo Native wrapper around our Rails web app had loaded perfectly when we tested it in the office. But out here, with no network, it just showed a white screen and a spinning spinner that would never stop. The client smiled politely. I wanted to disappear into the hay. That day taught me something that no amount of architectural diagrams could have conveyed: Offline is not a feature. It’s a promise you make to your users. And if you’re building a hybrid app with Turbo Native, you’d better have a strategy to keep that promise when the world goes dark. The Dream and the Reality Turbo Native is a beautiful piece of technology. For those who haven’t used it: it’s part of the Hotwire ecosy