@cobaltdesk
Cobalt Desk
Offline-first desktop client for field teams, shipped on three platforms in five months.
- Client
- Cobalt Desk
- Year
- 2024
- Services
- Desktop Software
- Duration
- 4 months
- Industry
- SaaS
Challenge
Cobalt Desk field teams work in basements, rural sites and moving vehicles, often offline for hours. The existing web tool lost their work whenever connectivity dropped.
Solution
We built an offline-first desktop client in Electron and TypeScript. All data is stored locally in SQLite first, then synced in the background whenever a connection is available.
Outcome
Cobalt Desk shipped on all three platforms in five months, on schedule and without data-loss incidents in the pilot.
01 — Challenge
The challenge
Cobalt Desk field teams work in basements, rural sites and moving vehicles, often offline for hours. The existing web tool lost their work whenever connectivity dropped.
Crews had resorted to paper notes and photos, then re-entered everything at the end of the day, which doubled their admin time.
The company needed a dependable client on macOS, Windows and Linux, because field laptops varied widely across contractors.
02 — Solution
Our approach The solution
We built an offline-first desktop client in Electron and TypeScript. All data is stored locally in SQLite first, then synced in the background whenever a connection is available.
Conflicts are resolved with field-level merging and a visible history, so two people editing the same job never silently overwrite each other.
- Local-first storage with background sync
- Field-level conflict resolution with history
- Signed installers for macOS, Windows and Linux
- Auto-update with staged rollouts
A shared TypeScript core between client and backend kept the project to five months, with one team covering all three platforms.
Results
Platforms shipped
macOS, Windows and Linux clients
Time to launch
From kickoff to public release
03 — Outcome
The outcome
Cobalt Desk shipped on all three platforms in five months, on schedule and without data-loss incidents in the pilot.
Field teams adopted it quickly, and it became the default tool for job reports within a quarter.
Daily admin time per crew dropped noticeably because nothing needed re-entering at the end of the shift.
It just works when there is no signal, which is the whole point. Our crews stopped carrying paper and trust the app with their day.
Marcus Lindqvist
VP of Operations · Cobalt Desk
Tech stack
- Electron
- TypeScript
- SQLite
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