Cool post, and definitely a concept devs should consider. I've only experienced the garden variety of offline (hiking out if cell service, not having a phone data plan, etc - not a government in chaos), but I still find offline capability super handy.

Especially even basic stuff, I know Google Maps used to 'expire' offline maps every 30 days. Like, I have a 40 day old map and no service, but it won't tell me where to go (dunno if they still do that or not - ditched G Maps a long while back). Some more thought into "hey, what if people are offline" would be nice.

Edit: Also, shout out to paper too. I've got a bit of reference books (maps in my car, a copy if the survival medicine handbook at home, etc). Necessity might be the only way to get my Gen Z self to read a paper map, but could be handy to have.

For offline maps, I switched to CoMaps when they forked Organic Maps. Development seemed to be moving faster there. I still have Google Maps and Here Maps installed, both with offline maps of the areas I'm usually at or to where I'm travelling. Too much redundancy perhaps, but no service/data source is good everywhere and I have a lot of free space on my phone, so it's not a problem for me.

For communications, I've been looking into Meshtastic and Meshcore. I have no need for them right now and they're not very reliable for messaging (especially Meshtastic, Meshcore works better here in London, but their coverage isn't great), but clients are fairly cheap and you can get a network going in case something happens.

Parts of Portugal were affected by bad weather recently, with some areas losing power and eventually mobile networks. On a Portuguese group for mesh stuff, some people reported being able to send some messages where phones were down, so it doesn't hurt to have a few clients just in case.

Hi, writer of the post here.

Love to hear your opinions and further guidance on this matter.

Also, if the website is not available, it's because of another blackout :)