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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail is a webapp, and it's very obvious. I use it out of laziness, because I don't use email on my phone that much. I wish they'd make a proper mobile client, but I don't think they care, since it's been like this forever.

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OT1H, I don't have a horse in the fight about whether you're right or not, but I was curious because if it is a web app they did a damn stellar job

But no, it's a formal android app and I offer two pieces of supporting evidence: the resource browser shows the apk very obviously has a bazillion android resource files <https://imgur.com/a/pUbQ8Bp> and it supports native fingerprint auth

I dunno if it's native or not, but the Fastmail app doesn't work when you're offline.

I'm not sure why it doesn't work offline, then. The UI refuses to load at all if I don't have an internet connection.

Native fingerprint auth can be implemented on top of a webapp; that isn't evidence either way.

Native app doesn’t guarantee “caches data for offline access”.

True. I seem to remember that the UI itself did not load when there's no internet connection, but I just tried it, and it does now. So maybe things have changed, or I misremembered.

Either way, no offline access in an email app... pretty bad.

It's not a native app. The main interface where you view your mailboxes, compose new emails, edit settings etc is a web view. The interface doesn't even load if you're offline, let alone your emails. Certainly some parts of the UI are native, but that's true of any web app.

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