Modern mobile app users expect their apps to work offline. A local-first app design stores all user data locally on the device first, allowing instant reads/writes, and synchronizes changes to the cloud server in the background when connectivity returns.
Why Drift for Flutter?
Drift is a powerful, reactive persistence library for Dart and Flutter. Written on top of native SQLite, it allows writing tables in type-safe Dart code, compiles them into optimized SQL queries, and automatically exposes reactive Stream observers.
// Define Drift Table in Flutter
class Tasks extends Table {
IntColumn get id => integer().autoIncrement()();
TextColumn get title => text().withLength(min: 1, max: 80)();
BoolColumn get completed => boolean().withDefault(const Constant(false))();
}Handling Background Synchronization
Offline changes must be queued in a local operations log table. When network changes are detected, a background worker pushes these serialized transactions to the remote REST/GraphQL API sequentially, resolving any conflict states.