per the article, in the Burma case, you have multiple banking branches with only intermittent internet connections, and therefore want to be able to work offlin

per the article, in the Burma case, you have multiple banking branches with only intermittent internet connections, and therefore want to be able to work offline easily while still querying the (albeit stale) database state. Streams of messages don't work as well when you're multi-party, and the default state is offline, not online