[Andrew]

The "Loading" progress bar when OmniFocus for the iPhone launches is not it contacting the server - it's just it loading the local database.

OmniFocus sometimes will contact the server on launch, but only if it hasn't checked for changes in the past hour. This applies to both the iPhone app and the desktop app. If you're not seeing changes that you think should be there, it may simply be that OmniFocus hasn't grabbed those changes from the sync location yet - try doing a manual sync in that case. (And make sure that OmniFocus has pushed the changes to the sync location from wherever those changes were made. It will automatically push changes a minute or two after you make the change, but if you exit OmniFocus before it has a chance to sync up, those changes won't get pushed until you next launch the app.)