The connection indicator
A globe sits permanently in the header, beside the report title. It is not conditional on something being wrong, because "will an AI request work if I ask right now" needs to be answerable at a glance rather than discovered by trying.
The three states
| State | Meaning | |
|---|---|---|
| 🟢 | Connected | A recent request to our server succeeded. |
| 🟠 | Weak or unstable | The connection is unreliable, requests are failing intermittently, or work is still queued. |
| 🔴 | Offline | A fresh attempt to reach the server failed. |
Why it is not just "online / offline"
Because the browser's own online flag is wrong in both directions, and on iOS it is wrong often:
- It reports online on a wifi network with no route out — the hotel-login case, and the trust-guest-network case.
- It reports offline during the cell handovers a moving vehicle produces constantly.
A clinician told they are offline while holding working 4G loses the AI features for nothing. So MedJot judges by a real round trip to our server, combined with whether the app's own recent requests have been succeeding.
One consequence worth knowing: only a fresh failed probe turns the globe red. A passing probe with the browser claiming to be offline shows amber, not red — the evidence outranks the claim.
A background heartbeat re-checks automatically, more often the worse things look, and pauses while the tab is hidden. That is what recovers a session that went red in a tunnel without anyone having to notice.
Tapping it
Tapping the globe re-checks the connection, retries queued work, and opens a panel showing:
- Why it is in the state it is in
- Your free report or trial status — see The daily free report limit
- Any queued AI requests and their state
- A force refresh
The same summary appears in Settings → General → Troubleshooting.
Amber is the one to pay attention to
Red is obvious and the app behaves accordingly. Amber is the state where things half-work: requests take a long time and then fail, and a queued job may sit longer than you expect.
If you see amber and you are about to do something that needs the network, tap the globe first and let it re-check.
If it stays red on a work device
A permanently red globe on a managed device, especially where the browser also showed a certificate warning, is almost always the network rather than the app. This is common enough to have its own page: Diagnosing a blocked deployment, and for your IT department, TLS inspection.
The characteristic symptom is that MedJot opens and looks fine — because the interface is cached on the device — while every network request fails. The app then correctly reports itself offline on a device with an apparently working connection.