Because when your selling point is that its local first (or distributed, or any other politically trendy thing), you concentrate on that over the app's core value proposition. The end result is you make an app that does what people think they want at the expense of doing as good a job as possible at the thing people actually want.
Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
201–210 of 494 posts
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's crazy that we live in a time when "pay with money and your data" or "pay with your eyeballs" are the only viable options and "pay with your money without your data" can't even be considered.
Someone has to prove that there’s a demand for paid local first subscriptions. Open source and tailscale can’t shoulder it all if you want more adoption.
Or split into 2 things:
Most people have a Dropbox, Apple Storage, Google Storage or similar.
A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.
It is sort of a combo of those 2 things economically.
Dropbox could sweep up here by being the provider of choice for offline apps. Defining the open protocol and supporting it. adding notifications and some compute.
You then use Dropbox free for 1, 5, 10 offline apps (some may need free some paid) and soon you'll need to upgrade Storage like any iPhone user!
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#203I 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…
It's crazy that we live in a time when "pay with money and your data" or "pay with your eyeballs" are the only viable options and "pay with your money without your data" can't even be considered.
The problem with local apps is actually a problem with closed-source software. I refuse to rely on closed-source software to access my data because then I am beholden to the vendor of that software to access my data. It’s only slightly better than putting my data in the cloud. What I really want is the source code to that local app so I can guarantee the ability to continue accessing my data forever. This can be done with open source software but very few companies want to sell their product as open source. Some version of source-available may help but you still have the problem of the company discontinuing support so you need some escape hatch on the license in that case and as far as I know nobody has tried.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#204I 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…
Yes, I don't think replicated data structures are the problem. Look at single player video games, cannot get more ideal for local-first. Still you need a launcher and internet connection.
You need a launcher and internet connection in the same way as you "need" to read a 15Mb wall of text to use your iPhone. They need to bully you into it.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I don't think replicated data structures are the problem. Look at single player video games, cannot get more ideal for local-first. Still you need a launcher and internet connection.
No you don't. There are plenty of games you can buy and go into the wilderness and play just fine offline. Just because game developers WANT you to be online so they can get data doesn't mean you NEED to be online.
[deleted]
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#206The number of people willing to pay for local-first, self-hosted, or federated apps, and the amounts they're willing to pay, is just not enough compared to vast majority of people who don't care.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#207They were popular until the internet was invented.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#208If you spend effort being local-first, you can’t spend that on features or UX.
You have a disadvantage vs. competitors who focus solely on the latter.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#209"It's open source, build it yourself" - Can't build it for my machine, but will try prebuilt executable.
"It works everywhere" - Doesn't run on my GPU, OS combination, will tweak settings for a bit.
"Add your API Key here" - Won't do it. "privacy reasons"
"You can run it locally then" - I'm really GPU poor and it runs 5 tok/s.
#1 Reason? - Lots of friction.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#210[dead]