How Viewpoint works offline

Viewpoint is built to work in the field — on a clifftop, in a forest, anywhere a signal drops. It is offline-first: your device holds the real copy of your data, and the network is only ever used to back it up and sync it.

Works fully offline

• Capturing a spot — location, the auto-stamped sun position, and your notes are saved on the device immediately.
• Browsing your library — every spot, photo, note, and saved map you’ve captured is available with no connection.
• Editing — renaming spots, editing notes, organising maps.
• The planning tools — sun, moon, and Milky Way calculations run entirely on your device.

Your spots and their pins always show on the map, online or not — they live on your device. The map imagery underneath them is a separate thing; see The map itself below.

A capture made offline is not lost — it is saved locally immediately. On the Online plan it’s also queued and syncs to our servers the next time you have a connection. On the Offline plan there is no Viewpoint account and nothing goes to our servers: on iPhone and iPad your captures sync across your devices through your own iCloud instead. On Android, the Offline plan is single-device — if you want your library kept in step across more than one Android device, that’s the Online plan. (Android’s own Auto Backup may still copy your library to your Google Drive unless you turn it off in Android Settings → Google → Backup — that’s a device-replacement safety net, not sync; see the privacy policy for the full picture.)

Needs a connection

• Forecasts — cloud-cover and weather forecasts are live data; they refresh when you are online and show the last known values otherwise.
• Syncing between devices, and cloud backup.
• Photo upload — by default photos upload on Wi-Fi only, to spare your mobile data. This is configurable in Settings.
• The map imagery — see below.

The map itself

Viewpoint’s map streams its imagery from the map provider as you pan and zoom. Unlike your data, that imagery is not stored for offline use:

• Your spots and pins always show — they live on your device, so they appear whether you’re online or not.
• The map underneath them needs a connection. If you arrive somewhere new with no signal, your pins can sit on a blank background until you’re online again.
• A “download this area for offline use” option — the way Google Maps and similar apps work — isn’t available yet. It’s something we’re looking into; it has not shipped.

We’re spelling this out because “offline-first” is core to Viewpoint, and today that promise covers your data — your spots, photos, notes, and plans — not the map imagery itself. If your trips take you beyond cellular coverage, plan around that for now.

Sync, briefly

Sync runs in the background when you come back online — you do not have to do anything. On the Online plan it syncs through our servers; on the Offline plan, through your own iCloud on iPhone and iPad (on Android, the Offline plan stays on the one device). If two devices edited the same spot while offline, the most recent edit wins.

Note: You will never be signed out for being offline. A dropped connection or an expired token does not log you out or hide your data — your captures stay on the device and on screen.