Which parts of a meal planner still work offline?
A meal planner that stores its data on the device works fully offline: the week, the shopping list, your saved recipes and the export. The one thing that genuinely needs a connection is importing a recipe from a link, because it has to fetch the page. An app that keeps your plan on a server will show you a spinner in the frozen aisle.
1The aisle is where apps get found out
Large supermarkets are built out of steel and concrete and are frequently half underground. Signal there ranges from poor to none, and it is the exact moment you need your list.
This is the single most useful test of a shopping app and almost nobody applies it before buying. An app that fetches your list from a server has nothing to show you at the moment of maximum need.
2What runs on the device and what does not
Anything that is arithmetic on data you already have can run offline: opening the week, adding a meal, ticking items off, changing how many people are eating, exporting everything.
Anything that needs something new from outside cannot: importing a recipe from a URL, downloading a recipe library, syncing with another phone, checking a subscription for the first time. In Farro that list is one item long — recipe import — and it says so rather than failing silently.
3Offline is not the same as cached
Some apps will show you a stale copy of your list without a connection and then quietly discard changes you made while offline. That is worse than refusing, because you believe the ticking worked.
The question to ask is not whether the app opens offline but whether edits made offline survive. A local-first app has no such problem: the device is the source of truth, so there is nothing to reconcile.
4How to test it in thirty seconds
Put the phone in aeroplane mode, force-quit the app and open it again.
If you see your week, tick something off, close it and reopen it and the tick is still there, the app is genuinely local. If you see a spinner, an error, or a login screen, you have your answer before you are standing in front of the freezers.
Questions people ask next
Do shopping list apps work without internet?
The good ones do. Anything that stores your list on the device works fully offline; anything that keeps it on a server does not, and supermarkets are exactly where you find out which you have.
Why does recipe import need a connection?
Because it downloads the page you pasted and reads the recipe data published on it. Nothing else in a planner needs the network, which is why it is worth building the rest so it does not.
Will changes made offline sync later?
In a synced app, usually — but not always, and that is the risk. In a local-first app there is nothing to sync, so a change made offline is simply the change.