Using Routerra with no signal

Routes go through places phones don't. The short version: the phone app is built for that and the web app isn't. If you expect to lose signal, drive from the app — driving is the part that keeps working without a connection.

The difference isn't only what works — it's whether you're told when something doesn't.

	Phone app	Web app
You're told you're offline	Banner, until you're back	Nothing — the page looks normal
Read a route you already opened	✓Yes	Only what's already on screen
Create or edit a route	Blocked, with a message	Fails silently — the spinner stops and nothing happens
Edit a stop	Blocked, with a message	Fails silently
Import stops	Blocked, with a message	Fails silently
Share a route	Blocked, with a message	Fails silently
Drive a route, mark stops delivered	Works — changes queue and sync later	Not built for offline
Save a saved stop	Blocked, with a message	Blocked — “Cannot save while offline”

On the phone app

The app assumes you'll go offline and tells you when you have. A banner appears — "You are offline — some features are unavailable" — and stays up while you're out of coverage. Once you've done things that are waiting to go up, the banner starts counting them instead: "You are offline — 3 changes will sync when you're back online".

That second banner is the one worth knowing about, because driving doesn't need a connection. Marking a stop delivered or skipped, adding a note to a stop, completing the terminal, starting, finishing or reopening a route — the app writes all of it down locally and sends it to the server by itself the moment you have signal again. You don't have to retry anything or remember what you did in the dead zone.

What is blocked is planning and editing: creating or changing routes and stops, importing, sharing, saved stops. Those are refused deliberately, with "This action requires an internet connection" rather than a failure — every row marked Blocked in the table above. You get Retry to try again once you think you're back; if you aren't, it says so — "Still offline — check your connection".

What still works with no signal:

• Driving the route, and recording what you did. Deliveries, skips, notes and finishing the route are all kept and synced when you're back.
• Looking at a route you've already opened, including the stop list and their order.
• Your saved stops, which the app keeps its own copy of.
• GPS. Your position still works — that's the satellites, not the network.

What doesn't:

• Building or changing a route: new routes, new or edited stops, imports, sharing, and optimizing.
• Turning a location into a street address. GPS gives coordinates; converting those to an address needs the network. So a stop you capture in a dead zone is stored as a point with no address until you're back. See A stop shows an error.
• Map tiles you haven't already loaded.

On the web app

The web app has no offline handling, and this is worth knowing before you rely on it.

There's no banner. Nothing on the page changes when your connection drops, so the first sign of trouble is an action not working.

And when an action fails, it fails silently. Press Create on a new route with no connection and the button turns into a spinner, the request fails almost immediately, and then nothing visible happens at all: the spinner stops, the form is still sitting there, and no message tells you the route wasn't created. The same shape of failure applies to most other actions that need the server. It isn't a hang — requests do give up on their own — it's an outcome you're never shown.

If an action in the web app finished and left no trace, check your connection, then reload the page. Reloading is what tells you what really got saved. Anything you'd filled in but not successfully saved is gone, so re-enter it once you're back online.

Two parts do better than that. Saved stops tells you plainly — "Cannot save while offline" — instead of failing quietly. And Optimize shows an error toast when the request fails, so at least you know it didn't run.

Which to use where