The field is not a city
A rural site is built for a few hundred phones. On a festival weekend thousands arrive at once, and the nearest masts saturate by mid afternoon. Messages queue, pages time out and apps that fetch the lineup on open show a spinner.
Temporary masts help, and they are worth asking your site operator about. They do not fix the dead spots behind a stage or in a wooded campsite.
What has to be on the phone
- The full lineup and every set time, including the days still to come.
- The person's own saved sets and the reminders for them.
- The site map with stages, facilities and first aid.
- The last few announcements, so a stage change is not missed.
Flux keeps all of it on the phone. The lineup syncs whenever there is signal and reads from the phone when there is not. Nothing on this screen needs a connection.
Changes still have to arrive
Offline first does not mean frozen. When a set moves, the change should reach every phone at the next moment of signal, without the person doing anything. Saved sets should follow the change, and the reminder should move with them.
Get it on phones before the gates
The best time for the app to download everything is the week before, on home wifi. Put the download link in the ticket email and the know-before-you-go page, not only on signs at the gate.
Battery is the other signal
An app that polls the network drains a phone by Saturday night. Prefer an app that syncs in the background on its own schedule, and give your audience a reason to keep it, not refresh it.
Paste it in and see it on a phone, the way your audience would offline.