Open Spotify on a plane without downloading your music first and you get a grey library. Open Notion without internet and you get a loading spinner that never resolves. Open almost any productivity app released in the last three years without a connection and you discover that the app is really just a window to a server, dressed up to look like software.
Offline functionality hasn’t been deprecated with a blog post or a changelog entry. It’s been quietly starved out, one cloud-sync dependency at a time.
This Wasn’t Always the Default
Desktop software from the 2000s worked entirely offline because it had no choice. Your word processor, your photo editor, your music player - these were programs that ran on your machine using your machine’s resources. The internet was a feature you opted into, not a substrate the app required to boot.
The shift to SaaS and cloud-native apps inverted that relationship. Connectivity became assumed, and offline became an edge case that costs engineering time to support well. Figma’s offline mode is genuinely good - you can work locally and sync when reconnected - but Figma built it deliberately, against the grain of how most web-based tools behave.
Most tools didn’t bother.
The Excuse Doesn’t Hold Up
The standard justification is that real-time collaboration requires a live connection, and that’s true. But most people aren’t collaborating in real time most of the time. They’re writing a document alone, editing a spreadsheet, drafting an email, reviewing a design. The collaborative features that justify cloud dependency are used intermittently. The offline penalty is paid constantly.
Progressive Web Apps were supposed to solve part of this through service workers and local caching. The technology works. But most PWAs implement just enough caching to show you a branded error screen instead of a browser default one. That’s not offline support. That’s offline theatre.
Who Actually Pays the Price
It’s not the person in a San Francisco coffee shop with gigabit Wi-Fi. It’s the person on a train through rural England, on a flight over the Atlantic, or in a building with flaky internal networking. Connectivity is unevenly distributed, and apps that assume it penalise people based on where they are and what infrastructure they can access.
There’s also a less-discussed cost: when your app requires a server to function, your app stops working when that server goes down, when the company shuts down, or when they decide your subscription tier no longer includes that feature. Offline-capable software is, among other things, more durable software.
The regression is real. We just stopped calling it one.