Spinning a wheel with no internet

What works without a connection?

All of it. There is no account, no sync and no server holding your wheels, so there is nothing for a missing connection to interrupt.

• Building and editing wheels, including pasting a long list at once.
• Spinning, weighted options and elimination mode.
• The ready-made wheels, which ship inside the app rather than being fetched.
• Saved wheels, search across them, and spin history.
• The quick deciders — coin flip, dice, random number, yes or no.
• The home screen widget.

When does that actually matter?

More often than it sounds, because the moments people reach for a random picker are frequently the moments with no signal.

In a classroom or hall

School networks are unreliable and often locked down. A wheel that needs one is a wheel that fails in front of thirty people.

On a plane or underground

Long journeys are where families actually use a decision wheel, and they are exactly where a web tool stops working.

Abroad, or out of data

Roaming off, allowance spent, prepaid ran out. None of it changes anything here.

At a party in a basement flat

One bar of signal and eight people waiting. This is the everyday case, not the edge case.

What does use the internet, then?

Advertising, and nothing else. The app is free and ad-supported, so it will load an ad when it can. If it cannot — you are offline, or the request fails — the app carries on and you spin as normal. No feature is behind an ad, and no ad interrupts a spin or appears while you are editing a wheel.

Your wheels, options and history are never uploaded anywhere. There is no account to create and no copy of your data on any server of ours, which is also why there is nothing to sync and nothing to lose when the connection goes.

Is it really offline, or just cached?

Really offline. The ready-made wheels ship inside the app rather than being downloaded, and there is nothing to fetch for a spin: the draw is computed on the device from the wheel in front of you. Nothing is cached because nothing was remote to begin with.

That is also why there is no first-run download and no sign-in step. You install it and it works, on a plane, on the first attempt.

What does it ask permission for?

The app itself asks for three things: to vibrate, to send you a notification, and to start after your phone restarts so a scheduled notification still arrives. It does not ask for your contacts, photos, camera, microphone or location.

It cannot browse your files either. When you save or open a backup, Android’s own file picker hands the app that one file and nothing else. The network permissions come from the advertising component, which is the only part that uses a connection.

What about the reminder notification?

That works offline too, because it is worked out on your phone. If you spin a particular wheel at about the same time on several separate days, the app notices the pattern from your own spin history and sends one notification at that time. None of that analysis leaves the device, and a single switch turns it off.

A website works too — when does offline actually decide it?

Honestly, if you always have signal and you build a fresh wheel each time, a website is a perfectly good answer and there is no reason to install anything. Offline is not a better feature in the abstract; it is the thing that matters in specific moments.

• You need it to work the first time, in front of people, with no chance to retry. A page that fails to load in front of a class is a different kind of failure from one that fails at your desk.
• You use the same list repeatedly. Rebuilding a register in a browser every week is the actual cost, and it is larger than it looks.
• You want it in one tap. A home screen widget cannot be a browser tab.
• You would rather your list of names never left the phone at all.

If nothing is in the cloud, how do you move your wheels?

You save them to a file yourself, from Settings, and restore it on another phone. You choose where the file goes and it is yours from that point — no account in the middle, and nothing uploaded. The file holds your wheels and their options; it does not include your spin history.