IMO, offline read-only is enough of a compromise. How many times are users truly offline, AND want to be able to edit at that time (and deal with the potential conflicts, which by the nature of the operation, won't have a good UX)?
Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
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Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#12Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls
But also nowadays you want to have information from other computers. Everything from shared calendars to the weather, or a social media entry. There's so much more you can do with internet access, you need to be able to access remote data.
There's no easy way to keep sync, either. Look at CAP theorem. You can decide which leg you can do without, but you can't solve the distributed computing "problem". Best is just be aware of what tradeoff you're making.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#13If they're building this on top of sqlite, probably worth considering adopting https://rqlite.io/ that has already done a lot of work for a clustered sqlite
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#14Technical reasons are honestly overblown - it all boils down to one, business, reason - control.
When you do serverside stuff you control everything. What users can do, and cannot do.
This lets you both reduce support costs as it is easier to resolve issues even by ad-hoc db query, and more importantly - it lets you retroactively lock more and more useful features behind paywall. This is basically The DRM for your software with extra bonus - you don't even have to compete with previous version of your own software!
i want my local programs back, but without regulatory change it will never happen.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#15I've only started playing with local first recently to learn the Service Worker API and IndexedDB, and I'm looking forward to learning about CRDTs more. Here's a little todo app that I built:
[1] GitHub: https://github.com/hasanhaja/tasks-app/ [2] Deployed site: https://tasks.hasanhaja.com/
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#16> Offline-first apps sound like the future: instant loading, privacy by default, and no more spinning loaders on flaky connections. The future? I thought all apps were like this before this web2.0 thing ruined it.
What's a little funny to me is that most of Web 2.0 was supposed to solve things like collaborating on a Word doc on a shared server, ideally getting us around the X+1 versions of files problem, but collaboration is a human problem, so now we have X+1 versions, but in the cloud.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#17It’s a least-common denominator effect. I.e., most people don’t care. Local-first is optimal for creative and productivity apps. (Conversely, non-local-first are terrible for these.) But most people are neither creative nor optimally productive (or care to be).
> most people don’t care.
it's not that they "don't care", but that they dont know this is an issue that needs to be cared about. Like privacy, they didnt think they need it until they do, but by then it's too late.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#18The author’s journey is probably just starting. I had this exact mindset about 10 years ago. Long story short: distributed systems are hard. A linear log of changes is an absolute lie, but it is a lie easy to believe in.
> distributed systems are hard.
While this may be true, the central issue is a different one: most users and/or developers are not very privacy-conscious, so they don't consider it to be worth the effort to solve the problems that go in hand with such distributed systems.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#19I spent some time learning about PouchDB a little while ago, it seems to be a nice solution at least for a No SQL approach. Although I still need some more practical experience to understand the security model, because it feels weird to just sync a database that was updated on some web page, really you want to ensure there is validation and treat it as an untrusted source to some extent. Still not sure of the best way to deal with that without implementing most of the application as server side validation scripts, or maybe that is just the way to do it.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#20Lotus Notes solved syncing for object databases but the world forgot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes
Ahhh Lotus Notes... in many ways ahead of its time, timeless and horribly outdated at the same time.
I still remember the crazy password screen with the symbols that changed as you typed.
If that was deterministic, that was a very bad idea.