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Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

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Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#21

Post by hobs »

Xelbair wrote: post #14

Technical 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 so…

Yep at every company I have ever worked at the question is not only how to assert control, but how to maintain it for the long term. Even if the company isn't exploiting you today, they want the option for later.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#22

Post by jakelazaroff »

The real answer to the question isn't technical. Local-first apps haven't become popular because companies recognize that their value comes from controlling your data.

In a talk a few years ago [1], Martin Kleppman (one of the authors of the paper that introduced the term "local-first") included this line:

> If it doesn't work if the app developer goes out of business and shuts down the servers, it's not local-first.

That is obviously not something most companies want! If the app works without the company, why are you even paying them? It's much more lucrative to make a company indispensable, where it's very painful to customers if the company goes away (i.e. they stop giving the company money).

[1] https://speakerdeck.com/ept/the-past-present-and-future-of-l...

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#23

Post by xorvoid »

I believe the lack of popularity is more of an economics problem. There are established business models for SaaS apps or freemium with ads. But, the business model for local-first apps is not as lucrative. Those who like the local-first model value features like: data-sovereignty, end-to-end encryption, offline usage, etc. These properties make existing business models hard-to-impossible to apply.

My current thinking is that the only way we get substantial local-first software is if it's built by a passionate open-source community.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#24

Post by marginalia_nu »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

Local-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 re…

> 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.

Git has largely solved asynchronous decentralized collaboration, but it requires file formats that are ideally as human understandable as machine-readable, or at least diffable/mergable in a way where both humans and machines can understand the process and results.

Admittedly git's ergonomics aren't the best or most user friendly, but it at least shows a different approach to this that undeniably works.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#25

Post by cosmic_cheese »

api wrote: post #8

I feel like a broken record here: it is not an engineering problem. Local-first and decentralized apps haven't become popular because SaaS has a vastly superior economic model, and more money means more to be invested in both polish (UI/UX) and marketing. All the technical challenges of decentralized or local-first apps are solvable. They are no harder than the technical challenges of doing cloud at scale. If there w…

Cloud SaaS services are often extremely heavily marketed, too, often with a VC-backed ad spend pool. That’s difficult if impossible to compete with.

There’s also an upcoming generation that doesn’t know what a filesystem is which also doesn’t help matters.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#27

Post by rkapsoro »

The use case I always think of is the developer experience for regular hobbyist and workaday devs writing their apps with local-first sync.

Apple comes close with CloudKit, in that it takes the backend service and makes it generic, basically making it an OS platform API, backed by Apple's own cloud. Basically cloud and app decoupled. But, the fundamental issue remains, in that it's proprietary and only available on Apple devices.

An open source Firebase/CloudKit-like storage API that requires no cloud service, works by p2p sync, with awesome DX that is friendly to regular developers, would be the holy grail for this one.

Dealing with eventually consistent data models is not so unusual these days, even for devs working on traditional cloud SAAS systems, since clouds are distributed systems themselves.

I would be very happy to see such a thing built on top of Iroh (a p2p network layer, with all the NAT hole punching, tunnelling and addressing solved for you) for example, with great mobile-first support. https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#28

Post by bryanlarsen »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

Local-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 re…

There's no perfect general solution, but the number of conflicts generated by small teams collaborating in an an environment where the internet almost always works is going to be miniscule. No need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#29

Post by gizmo »

I think that the database layer is the wrong layer for reconciliation of change sets.

The main problem with any sync system that allows extensive offline use is in communicating how the reconciliation happens so users don't get frustrated or confused. When all reconciliation happens as a black box your app won't be able to do a good job at that.

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