A lot of apps say “works offline” and mean something narrower than it sounds — maybe the home screen loads, but half the buttons spin forever the moment you’re out of signal. We wanted to be specific instead of just making the claim, so here’s exactly what does and doesn’t need a connection in Amunta.
Setting up the app
You can go through setup in airplane mode. Onboarding touches the network for exactly two things, and neither one blocks you from finishing if it fails:
- A currency suggestion based on your general location — purely a convenience. With no connection it falls back to a default currency and you pick the right one from the list, the same list you’d use either way.
- A one-off technical device registration: platform, OS version, device model, app version, app language and the currency you chose. It carries no name, no contacts and no amounts. It’s part of the anonymous usage stats you can switch off in privacy settings — with the honest caveat that this first send happens before you reach that switch.
Using the app day to day
Every core screen works fully without a connection: recording income or an expense, adding or settling a debt, building an invoice, setting a budget, reading your reports and charts. None of it waits on a server, none of it shows a loading spinner because it’s trying to reach somewhere. You open the app, you do the thing, it’s done.
What actually uses the internet
Two features wait on a connection — the only two that stop working offline:
- A-Link, to exchange encrypted data between devices.
- Google Drive, to upload or restore an encrypted backup.
Both are optional. Losing the connection never blocks the core ledger.
And three background calls you never wait on and never notice. We list them because accounting for every connection is the whole point of this article: anonymous usage stats, the technical device registration described above, and crash reports when something breaks. None of them carries amounts, financial records or contacts, and a single switch under Settings → Privacy turns all three off.
Why we think this is worth a whole article instead of a bullet point
If you’ve ever been somewhere with bad signal — a basement, a flight, a rural area, a country where your plan doesn’t cover data — you know the specific annoyance of an app that technically “has an offline mode” but actually means “you can look at cached data while half the buttons silently fail.” We didn’t want to build that and call it offline-first. The test we held ourselves to is simple: turn off the connection entirely, and see if anything in daily use actually breaks. As far as the core app goes, nothing does.