What a visitor sees when the connection drops
A website converted to an app from its URL loads pages from your server, the same as a browser. Lose the connection — a lift, a tunnel, a flaky café network — and the WebView shows Android's built-in error: a grey page, a broken-page glyph, "Webpage not available", and a raw error code. It is the least app-like moment a converted site can have, and it is the one your visitor is most likely to screenshot.
The fix is a page of your own that the app shows instead. The builder already does the swap — it intercepts the network error and loads a bundled fallback — and this tool writes the fallback in your colours, with your words, and a button that actually retries.
Why the file has no dependencies
An offline page that loads a font from Google, an icon from a CDN or a stylesheet from your own server is a page that fails at exactly the moment it is needed. The generated file has every style inline, an inline SVG for the icon, and uses the system font. It is around two kilobytes, it renders with the network cable pulled out, and it has nothing to cache.
The retry button, and retrying automatically
The button calls location.reload(). Inside the app that re-requests the page the visitor was trying to reach — the fallback is shown at the original URL, not instead of it — so a successful retry lands where they were going. The optional listener on the browser's online event does the same thing without a tap the moment the phone reports a connection, which on most Android versions is reliable enough to be worth turning on.
Writing the message
- Say what happened, not what went wrong. "You're offline" beats "Network error (ERR_INTERNET_DISCONNECTED)".
- Reassure about state. If a cart or a draft survives, say so. If it does not, say what to do.
- One action. Retry. Not a menu, not a link to the help centre they cannot load.
- Match the app. The brand colour and the app name make it obviously yours and not a system screen.
Going further: content that works offline
A fallback page is the minimum. If parts of your site should genuinely work without a connection — a menu, a schedule, a set of instructions — the answer is to bundle them into the app rather than fetch them. The builder's HTML and ZIP inputs do exactly that: the pages ship inside the APK and load from the device, so they work in airplane mode with no fallback needed. The complete guide covers when to choose each route.