Delivered full Progressive Web App support — installable and offline‑capable — with Workbox runtime caching via next‑pwa.

Situation. A lot of NextMariner’s users are at sea. Seafarers and field staff, on phones, frequently offline or hanging off a bad connection — not people sitting at a desk on reliable office wifi. Building as if everyone had a fast, constant network would have quietly excluded a big part of the actual audience.

Task. The app had to be installable like a native one, and still usable when the network drops out.

Action. It’s delivered as a full Progressive Web App. It installs to the home screen with proper icons across the various sizes, a splash screen and theme colours, so it looks and launches like an app rather than a bookmark. The service worker is set up through the next‑pwa plugin, and Workbox runtime caching uses CacheFirst for the things that don’t change per request — fonts, images, audio, video, CDN assets — alongside sensible HTTP cache‑control headers. Because service workers only really behave over HTTPS, HTTPS‑based testing validated the offline and install behaviour on real devices instead of hoping it worked.

Result. Users can install the app and keep using it offline, and repeat loads come back fast from cache instead of over the wire. The platform behaves like a native app on the hardware its users actually carry, which for this audience isn’t a nice‑to‑have — it’s the difference between the app being usable at sea and not.