I'm writing a web app to be used offline on iOS. I've created a manifest, am serving it up as text/cache-manifest, and it usually works fine, when running inside Safari.

If I add it as an app to my home screen, then turn on Airplane mode, it can't open the app at all -- I get an error and it offers to close the app. (I thought this was the entire purpose of an offline app!)

• When I load the app a first time when online, I can see in my logs that it's requesting every page listed in the manifest.

• If I turn off Airplane mode, and load the app, I can see the first file it's requesting is my main.html file (which is both listed in the manifest, and has the manifest=... attribute). It then requests the manifest, and all my other files, getting 200's for all (and 304's for anything requested a second time during this load).

• When I load the page in Chrome, and click around, the logs show the only thing it's trying to reach on the server is "/favicon.ico" (which is a 404, and which I don't think iOS Safari tries to load, anyway). All of the files listed in the manifest are valid and served without error.

• The Chrome inspector lists, under "APPLICATION CACHE", all the cached files I've listed which I expect. The entire set of files is about 50 KB, way under any limit on offline resources that I've found.

Is this supposed to work, i.e., am I supposed to be able to create an offline iOS app using only HTML/CSS/JS? And where do I go about figuring out why it's failing to work offline?

(Related but doesn't sound quite the same to me, since it's about Safari and not a standalone app: "Can't get a web app to work offline on iPod")