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.

## Why this question gets asked so often

Offline capability has become a critical question after a series of high-profile cloud outages in 2024-2025: ChatGPT's 3-hour January 2026 outage broke many cloud-dependent productivity apps, AWS US-East-1's October 2024 incident broke Notion for 4 hours, Microsoft's Azure outage in February 2025 broke OneNote for 6 hours. Each outage triggered a wave of "I need offline-capable tools" search activity. The 2024 r/Productivity poll asking "what feature do you wish your note app had?" placed "real offline-first" in the top 3 answers behind only "better search" and "lower price." The persistence of the question also reflects modern travel realities — international roaming costs remain high, rural connectivity is spotty, and flights still mostly lack reliable wifi. For knowledge workers who depend on their notes apps, offline reliability isn't a luxury feature; it's a job requirement.

## The deeper story

The technical architecture for offline-first apps is genuinely harder than cloud-first. Cloud-first apps can assume a single source of truth (the server) and treat local copies as caches. Offline-first apps need to handle conflict resolution, sync queuing, partial sync states, and eventual consistency. The 2014 CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) research papers laid the theoretical foundation, but most apps don't implement CRDTs properly. Notion uses an Operational Transform model that can fail under high concurrency. Apple's CloudKit uses last-write-wins for fields plus structural merge for collections — adequate for most personal use cases. Local-first apps like Obsidian punt on the problem entirely by storing plain Markdown files and letting git or iCloud Drive handle sync. The 2024 paper "Local-first software" by Ink & Switch researchers (Kleppmann, Wiggins) is the manifesto for this architecture — Némos's CloudKit-based design aligns with their principles.

## Edge cases and gotchas

• Cellular data caps: even offline-first apps benefit from sync when online. iCloud usage shows up in your monthly cellular data.
• Background sync time limits: iOS limits background sync to 30-second slices. Large delta syncs after long offline periods may take multiple foreground sessions to complete.
• iCloud quota exhaustion: if your iCloud is full, sync pauses silently. Captures still save locally.
• Multi-device conflict windows: if you edit the same note on two offline devices, the merge happens at the first online reconnect.
• Offline AI features: depend on model availability. iOS 26 Foundation Models work offline; some apps with cloud AI degrade silently.
• Search index refresh: large new captures may not appear in search until next index rebuild (5-10 seconds).
• Watch + phone sync delays: when watch is offline but phone is online, watch captures queue until reconnect.
• Travel SIM swaps: changing carriers can sometimes disrupt iCloud background sync for 1-2 hours.

## What competitors say

Apple Notes is offline-capable but cloud-anchored — works without internet but loses cross-device freshness. Bear is similar (iCloud-backed, offline-capable). Obsidian is fully local — no cloud dependency at all; sync is optional. Notion is partially offline (cached pages only); creating new content offline is limited. Mem is cloud-only — useless offline. Tana is partially cached. Evernote has decent offline support after 2024 rewrites. Reflect Notes is E2E with offline. Logseq is local-first like Obsidian. Standard Notes is E2E + offline. Némos is offline-first by architecture — every capture, search, AI feature works without internet; CloudKit handles sync when available.

## Bottom line

Offline capability matters more than cloud companies admit. If you fly often, work in spotty-connectivity areas, or just want resilience to vendor outages, "offline-first" should be a hard requirement when picking a notes app. The simple test: enable Airplane Mode and try to do your normal workflow. If anything breaks, the app isn't actually offline-first. Cloud-only apps (Notion, Mem) fail this test; CloudKit-anchored apps (Apple Notes, Bear, Némos) pass; local-only apps (Obsidian local-only, Standard Notes local) pass with no dependency on Apple either. The trade-offs are real but offline-first is increasingly the floor, not the ceiling.