Offline & connectivity

Parch users are frequently on metered or unstable connections. Applications assume connectivity can vanish and return at any moment.

• Distinguish needs-network features from local ones; local functionality never degrades when offline.
• On network loss: show a persistent, dismissible banner, not a modal , and disable network-dependent actions, explaining why.
• Retry with backoff automatically for background work; make manual retry one obvious button for user-initiated work.
• Cache aggressively: the Store shows installed packages offline; the portal itself works fully offline once loaded.
• On reconnect, resume interrupted downloads from where they stopped (resumable HTTP) rather than restarting.
• Metered-connection awareness: bulk downloads ask before starting when the connection is metered.

Reference: the network mock offline state and the empty states demo.