Does Némos work offline?

Némos was architected offline-first from day one because the primary use case — capturing ideas before you forget — can't depend on cellular reception.

What works offline:

✓ Capture — voice memos, photos, screenshots, articles, notes. All save instantly to local storage.

✓ Search — every content type is indexed on-device. Full-text and semantic search work offline.

✓ AI features — Apple Foundation Models run on-device. Summarization, tagging, transcription all offline.

✓ OCR — Apple Vision framework runs locally. Screenshot text extraction works offline.

✓ Transcription — Apple Speech framework runs locally on iOS 18+. Voice memos transcribe immediately.

✓ Folder organization — drag and drop, tagging, custom folders.

✓ Apple Watch capture — works fully on-watch, syncs to iPhone via Bluetooth when in range.

✓ PDF reading and annotation — fully offline.

✓ Share sheet inputs — save from any app even without internet.

What requires internet (briefly):

• iCloud sync — when you come back online, Némos uploads changes via CloudKit and pulls updates from other devices.
• Article fetching for URL captures — when you save a URL, Némos needs to fetch the article HTML for parsing. If you save a URL offline, Némos saves the URL and fetches the content when online.
• App updates and Apple Foundation Models updates — these come from App Store / iOS updates, so they require internet at install time, not at use time.

The CloudKit sync model:

Némos uses Apple's CloudKit to sync. CloudKit is encrypted end-to-end and uses your iCloud account. Sync happens:

• In the background, opportunistically when you have wifi or cellular.
• Whenever you open the app and a change has happened on another device.
• Whenever you make a change locally (queued and pushed when online).

If you're offline for a week, all your captures sit in the local queue. When you come back online, sync happens in seconds.

Conflict resolution:

If you edit the same note on two devices while both are offline, then both come online — Némos uses last-write-wins for fields with timestamps, and merges where possible (folders, tags). Conflicts in user-visible content are surfaced for manual resolution.

Performance offline:

Némos is actually *faster* offline because it doesn't make network calls. Capture latency is <100ms in normal use. Search latency is <50ms across libraries of 10,000+ items.

Battery and storage:

On-device AI uses the Neural Engine, which is power-efficient. Heavy use (1 hour of transcription, OCR on 100 screenshots) might drain 5-10% of battery. Storage scales with your library — typically 100 MB per 1,000 items including thumbnails.

The comparison:

Best offline use cases:

• Flights — capture ideas, voice memos, photos. Everything syncs when you land.
• Subways — same.
• Remote travel — full functionality without data roaming.
• Datacenter outages — Némos is unaffected by Apple, OpenAI, or any cloud provider's outages.

The promise:

If iCloud is ever down (which has happened occasionally), Némos continues to work locally. Your data is yours, on your devices. No vendor outage can take it offline.