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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?

#111

Post by knubie »

jlarocco wrote: post #79

As a user the simple answer is that I'll always use a regular application instead of a "local-first" web app when I have the ability. "Local-first apps" are the worst of everything - crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source, etc. At work, I don't have a choice, so it's Google Docs or Office 365 or whatever. And in that context it actually makes…

> crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source

What does any of this have to do with local first? Most online only apps have this stuff too.

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

#112

Post by poisonborz »

The goals have shifted. What is "local" nowadays? ~Everybody uses multiple devices, and things are expected to be in sync. What users now (should) need is easy self-hosting apps and centralised storage, with clients that can work/cache offline locally. A good example is Bitwarden.

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

#113

Post by ainiriand »

MangoToupe wrote: post #107
gritzko wrote: post #5

The 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.

> A linear log of changes is an absolute lie Compared to what?

A graph of changes in a distributed system, I assume.

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

#115

Post by robenkleene »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #83

The free software evangelist in me says "because local-first gives more to the user of the software," which will tend not to happen when the user is not in control of the software. Realistically the reason is probably that it's easier to make changes if you assume everything is phoning home to the mother ship for everything. Also, an unrelated nit: "Why Local-First Apps Haven’t Become Popular?" is not a question. "Wh…

Apple is practically the most antithetical to "free software" company around, yet Apple maintains perhaps the largest fleet of local-first apps in existence, e.g., off the top of my head: Calendar, Contacts, Keynote, Mail, Notes, Numbers, Photos, and Pages (these are all examples of apps that support multi-device sync and/or real-time collaboration).

I think the truth of your statement is more that free software tends towards what you might call "offline" software (e.g., software that doesn't sync or offer real-time collaboration), because there's more friction for having a syncing backend with free software.

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

#116

Post by jjcob »

PaulHoule wrote: post #102
jjcob wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git works, but it leaves conflict resolution up to the user. It's good for a tool for professional users, but I don't see it being adopted for mainstream use.

The funny thing about it is I see git being used in enterprise situation for non-dev users to manage files, often with a web back end. For instance you can tell the average person to try editing a file with the web interface in git and they're likely to succeed. People say git is too "complex" or "complicated" but I never saw end users succeeding with CVS or Mercurial or SVN or Visual Sourcesafe the way they do with…

> you can tell the average person to try editing a file with the web interface

Yes, but then you are not using a "local first" tool but a typical server based workflow.

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

#117

Post by MangoToupe »

ainiriand wrote: post #113
MangoToupe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A linear log of changes is an absolute lie Compared to what?

A graph of changes in a distributed system, I assume.

...how is that any less of a lie? You can project a linear log into a graph trivially.

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

#118

Post by isaachinman »

jjcob wrote: post #95
ktosobcy wrote: post #53

I try to use those as much as possible. We ended up in this situation mostly because of the Google push to make everything an "web-app" with web-technologies instead of protocols... Anyone uses IMAP email? Works just fine (save for IMAP design but that's another story). Same with CalDAV. For stydy I use Anki and it has brilliant sync (it can even automatically/automagaically merge study changes when I study some item…

IMAP works fine until you try to continue working on a draft email that you started on another computer... somehow it always gets broken and I end up with 5 copies of the message in the drafts folder...

We fixed this at Marco, FYI.

https://marcoapp.io

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

#119

Post by cosmic_cheese »

api wrote: post #63
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There’s also an upcoming generation that doesn’t know what a filesystem is which also doesn’t help matters. This is why I sometimes think it's hopeless. For a while there -- 90s into the 2000s -- we were building something called "computer literacy." Then the phones came out and that stopped completely. Now we seem to have inverted the old paradigm. In that era people made jokes about old people not being able to u…

I know some of us technically inclined millennials intend to make a point of (or are already in the process of) ensuring that their kids are computer-literate. I’m not a parent but should that change I would certainly plan to. Whether or not that gets passed down to the grandkids or not is out of our control, but gotta do what you can right?

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

#120

Post by pixelpoet »

mhuffman wrote: post #114

Some people might say that the browser you are using to look at your webapp or ask chatgpt for something is a local-first app ... making it pretty damn popular.

That's a bit like saying we live in outer space because earth is in outer space.
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