I have the latest Bitwarden beta version on Android. I was recently on a long haul flight, and I needed my username and password for the airline to log into the seat back screen so I could get WiFi. Bitwarden didn’t let me log in, even though I’d opened it not all that long before in the airport.
It would be very useful if Bitwarden would cache the passwords on the device for a configurable period of time - it seems like it does for a short time, but not long. There can’t be all that much data, and modern devices have a lot of storage. It would be helpful in various scenarios - flights, when offline, etc.
There is a difference between logging in and unlocking.
Logging in downloads your encrypted vault to your device. Logging in absolutely requires an active Internet connection.
Unlocking decrypts the vault that was previously downloaded to your device. If you keep your vault in a logged in but locked state you should not need an Internet connection to unlock and view vault entries.
Making changes also absolutely requires an active Internet connection because changes are not considered compete until they have been safely backed up to the server.
I always lock Bitwarden, or just leave it running in the background so it locks itself, I never log out. It’s odd, sometimes I can access it when I’m offline, sometimes I can’t. I wonder if there’s some kind of a timeout after which it deletes the vault contents on the device.