Offline & data ownership
Works with no signal. Syncs when you ask.
Every field app claims to work offline. Most mean "we'll queue it and hope." Here the whole site visit runs on the device, and sync — on every tier — only sends what the observer asks it to.
How it works
The site visit runs on the iPad.
Your firm's edition of Specified Inspection Platforms is a single application file, installed to the home screen like any app. It carries the library, your projects and your firm's identity inside it.
After it is installed, the site visit involves no network at all. Photos are stored on the device. The report is generated on the device. The finished file is saved on the device.
That is not a limitation we're dressing up. It's the design decision the whole product is built around, and it's what lets a reviewer work in a parking garage three levels down without noticing the difference.
What needs a connection — and what doesn't
| Installing or updating the app | Connection needed, once |
|---|---|
| Running a full site visit | No connection |
| Taking & annotating photos | No connection |
| Generating the report | No connection |
| Reopening a saved report | No connection |
| Syncing to another device | Connection needed, when you ask |
| Weather & address autofill | Optional convenience |
| Emailing the finished report | Connection needed, once |
Weather lookup is the only outbound call during a visit, it's optional, and offline it stays silent rather than blocking your typing.
Why it matters commercially
Three arguments that close deals for our customers.
Owners who won't allow cloud storage
Data centers, secure facilities, government work, litigation-sensitive projects. Sync is switched on firm by firm, so a firm that keeps it off can still answer an owner’s security questionnaire truthfully.
Nothing to go down
No outage of ours can stop a site visit. Cloud-first competitors take their customers down with them; the app keeps working whether or not our infrastructure — or our company — is having a good day.
Kept, not lost
With sync on, every version the server receives is kept, deleted or overwritten photographs are recoverable, and the storage is locked against accidental deletion. With sync off, nothing of yours sits on our side at all.
The long tail
Your reports outlive your subscription.
A saved report is a self-contained file with its photographs embedded. It opens in any browser, on any computer, forever.
Envelope claims surface years after the work — sometimes after the warranty, sometimes in litigation. If your documentation lives inside someone else’s subscription, so does your defence.
With Specified Inspection Platforms, the files sit on your firm's own storage from the day they're generated. If you stopped subscribing tomorrow, every report you ever produced would still open exactly as it does today.
The honest trade-off
What working offline costs you — and how sync buys it back.
We would rather you hear this from us than discover it in month two.
Without sync, there is no automatic backup. An iPad that goes into the bay before the report is saved takes the working report with it. That is the single biggest real-world risk of keeping everything on the device.
Sync removes that risk and is part of the base app on every tier. A report started on a phone opens on the laptop, photographs follow, and a second observer picks up the same project without retyping anything.
Test it the honest way: turn off the wifi.
Offline isn't a feature bolted on at the end — it is the architecture. Ask us and we'll show you a whole site visit run in airplane mode.