All pouchdb Blog Posts

Partial Data Fetching on Initial Load with PouchDB and CouchDB posted Wednesday, July 16, 2025 by The Neighbourhoodie Team pouchdbCouchDBsynctip

If you’re building an offline-first or local-first app, you’ll eventually run into a problem concerning the initial loading of data onto the device: it gets a bit slow, and users end up having to wait for the initial sync to complete before they can do anything. This is such a prevalent issue that there was even a session on it at Local-First Conf recently. We’d like to share a strategy for dealing with "Partial Data Fetching on Initial Load" from experience with PouchDB and CouchDB. Get fast time-to-idle and synced data at the same time!