Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
blog.acolyer.org
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
1–10 of 243 posts
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#2Common sense.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#3My side project is a local first (local storage on web) JAMStack. For extra goodness it’s mobile first too.
I really love making apps this way for some reason. I think it’s the focus on just the UI and not worrying about the back end until later.
For this particular app I’d consider “smartwatch first” to have been better as its for fitness!
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#4Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data.
The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#5any marginally successful "local-first" app is going to go and raise $10m in vc, switch to software as a service, and add an enterprise mode that requires user permissions and data access to be managed on the server
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#6The blog post doesn't mention this, so I thought I'd point this out. One of the paper's authors is Martin Kleppmann, who wrote the very good https://dataintensive.net/ book.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#7It’s strange that Evernote is omitted from the list - it is a great example of local-first app.
Their recent-ish history, when the their free tire become limited to only syncing a few devices, illustrates that even if software is fully local, and supports open formats, having the functional cloud matters, a lot.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#8Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Yes. I always think data freedom is more important than software freedom. For example it matters less that MS Word is not free as in freedom when you can open the file in something that is.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#9My side project is a local first (local storage on web) JAMStack. For extra goodness it’s mobile first too. I really love making apps this way for some reason. I think it’s the focus on just the UI and not worrying about the back end until later. For this particular app I’d consider “smartwatch first” to have been better as its for fitness!
This is a really good way to prototype and find the minimum feature set for a SaaS startup.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#10[deleted]