Mobile Network Handoffs Can Corrupt Live Cursor State Without Sequence-Based Recovery
Developers building realtime collaborative editors on mobile devices face a risk when phones switch networks, because stale cursor updates can overwrite newer positions without raising any error. The article argues that the core challenge is proving which updates were missed during a connection change, not simply reconnecting the transport. Its proposed fix assigns a monotonic sequence number per document, has clients store the last applied value, and treats reconnect backfill as an explicit API contract. When the replay window has expired, the client installs an authoritative snapshot instead of guessing missing updates. The author also suggests modeling recovery states such as caught up, replaying, snapshot-required, and rejected cursor, since a simple connected flag cannot capture them.
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