Need to get some features available offline with UI Extension POS

Extensions
1

Need help.
I’m working with UI extension APP for Shopify POS, when internet is down, the extension also becomes disabled, how can have some critical features still working without internet connectivity?
We have mandatory functionality to still work offline even no internet connection.

2

We also have merchants who require this, is there anything in the pipeline at this time?

3

+1 from us too. We have also had many merchants request this. With the introduction of the storage API, I was hoping that this might be possible since apps don’t need to make any external API requests now.

4

Hey folks, there are no immediate plans to make POS UI extensions available offline. However, we’ve taken a note of this internally.

Could you expand on the merchant use cases please? I’m curious of what extension functionality they are hoping to preserve whilst the POS app is in an offline state.

5

Hi, our use case is that we have apps that update the price of products (weight-based and variable pricing). In most cases, the interaction leading up to this can happen strictly in the POS tile itself without external API requests.

In our case, if offline support for Product Search API + POS Cart Transform is also possible, then I believe our app’s general workflow could be conducted offline which would be a benefit to merchants.

6

I think that the storage api does make it easier to support offline or at least flaky wifi, which seems to be fairly common in retail stores.

I think theres a couple of things I’d love for offline support or better handling of this.

  1. Exposing the version numbers to apps, you can get POS version from the session but what it would be helpful to expose the extension version number and device version as well.

  2. Exposing the last time the device synced with Shopify for the product data etc, available under connectivity.

Both of these would help explain the state of the device, if its running an old POS version, not updated in a while or running an outdated version of extensions. For example I had a merchant who has a retail store but also has POS on his phone, because he’d not used it on his phone for a good few months everything was out of date and his device took a while to re-sync up and it displayed an error in our app until that happened.

  1. Understanding errors - at the moment a lot of error scenarios are wrapped up in the Load Failed message. This can be the device being offline, out of sync, permission issue etc. It would be really helpful for more clarity on these as at the moment if you get this you have to display a number of debugging steps. Clarity or known errors for these different states would help both app and merchant understand what is going on.

  2. Understanding network connectivity, without speaking to the merchant and understanding their retail store we don’t know about their connection state beyond yes or no. It would be helpful to understand the connectivity type e.g. cellular/wifi etc so we can help debug but also change our caching strategy Navigator: connection property - Web APIs | MDN

  3. I think also what would help would be Shopifys position on how offline POS should be, it used to be support offline a bit, now it seems to be online first etc.