Offline iOS web app: loads my manifest, but doesn't work offline
- by Ken
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")
