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They would seamlessly in the background pre-cache all the articles and images coming up in your feed so if you had intermittent connections like on the subway, you could browse nearly[0] unaffected.

[0] Unfortunately, the app I used in the before-time did not implement queuing for submitting comments/posts so that functionality was broken while you were between stations, and videos weren't cached.

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Web apps can do that too with service workers, it is just a bit of a pain in the ass.

And if you ever push a service worker with a bug, then you make the browser permanently unable to display the site unless the user knows how to manually remove the service worker. I've seen it happen on Gmail.

Yes it is a pain in the ass, but just for other people who read this, the bug was in the self-update code for the service worker. If you mess up the cache configuration it can make the service worker never look for an updated version of itself.

It is quite subtle thing in a very small part of the service-worker code but it is not like any random update can brick your app.

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