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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?

#211

Post by ghaff »

nenenejej wrote: post #202
chaostheory wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

More or less no one used to "happily" pay. Absent pirating software, they did pay often hundreds of dollars for all sort of software sight unseen (though shareware did provide try before you bought) which often came with minimal updates/upgrades unless they paid for such.

But expectations have largely changed.

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

#212

Post by vkou »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #208

If 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.

Is local-first local-only actually harder to build and secure than a four-nines uptime service?

I understand that it's less profitable, which is the real reason nobody does it.

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

#213

Post by sroerick »

Does anybody remember the architecture that account _unwriter was creating on Bitcoin? You could write a transaction from anywhere using and store data in it. Then you could read it through an API of either a full node or a node that was only subscribed to your unique hash ID. It seemed like a really good architecture to me. He kind of disappeared and most of the work lost

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

#214

Post by nenenejej »

ghaff wrote: post #211
nenenejej wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software. More or less no one used to "happily" pay. Absent pirating software, they did pay often hundreds of dollars for all sort of software sight unseen (though shareware did provide try before you bought) which often came with minimal updates/upgrades unless they paid for such. But expectations have largely changed.

Happy as you can be when paying for something!

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

#215

Post by AlienRobot »

I feel like the problem is simply... it should just be a file.

And if it were a file, you could sync it with dropbox or OneDrive.

And if you can do that, they can't make money selling their own cloud service for their local-first app.

More specifically, if you can edit different parts of a same document on different devices, then the document should be split across multiple files that can be synced independently, e.g. a photoshop document where each layer is a separate file and a "main" document simply loads them into a single layer stack.

In fact there are too many document types nowadays that are composites of sub-files and are even actually just a zipped folder under the hood. It feels like we should have just been using files all along, or some sort of file-folder hybrid with OS-level support instead of using zipped folders to contain all the files of a single document.

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

#216

Post by flkiwi »

"local first" to me translates almost immediately into the following:

- What if I don't have that device? - How do I reliably sync between devices? - How do I deal with local storage limits of a device?

Silverbullet has become very nearly my illustration of the perfect app, because it has a local, offline feature but syncs back to a server controlled by me. The weakness with SB specifically is any limits on browser storage, though that's less likely an issue for a note-taking tool that is, for me, 99.9% text.

Compare Logseq, which used to be browser-based and self-hostable, to their more recent "local-first, app-based" model, with a $15/mo charge to sync and severe usability restrictions in a world where I cannot install arbitrary software at work.

So, local-first has for me become synonymous with inconvenience, proprietary, and revenue channel for the dev rather than security and flexibility.

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

#217

Post by encom »

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…

>calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls

My last job was balls deep in the Google ecosystem, and all the collaborative editing, syncing and versioning and whatnot did nothing to stop that practice.

On a related note, I used to hate Gmail (I still do, but I used to too), until I had to use Outlook and all the other MS crap at my new job. Jesus christ. WTF even is Teams? Rhetorical question; I don't care.

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

#218

Post by nitwit005 »

> When you build a local-first app, you’ve effectively created a distributed system.

This is true, but any time there's more than one computer involved it's a distributed system. It doesn't matter if you're "local first" or not.

Plenty of apps that resolve everything server side do a terrible job handling conflicts.

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

#219

Post by AlienRobot »

0xffff2 wrote: post #133

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How on Earth could anyone consider the example in #2 "conflict-free"? You haven't removed the conflict, you're just ignored it! Anything can be conflict free in that case. Obviously not every problem will have such an obvious right answer, but given the example the author chose, I don't see how you could accept any solution that doesn't produce "100" as a correct result.

Yeah, that's an insane things for a program to do. The only correct thing for a software to do in case of conflict is to warn the user there is a conflict and provide them with the tools to fix the conflict. Assuming a solution is the last thing anyone wants.

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

#220

Post by throwmeaway222 »

The title doesn't match the content well, everyone's responding to the title!

The syncing issue is also handled better by making the logical unit that gets changed as small as possible. If you have two people editing a document, instead of locking the document, and wiping out changes from other people, think of it as a series of edits to a paragraph, or smaller a sentence, or even the exact word being changed. If someone has text highlighted, then lock anyone else out from editing it because there is a high chance they're going to erase it or paste over it.

Lastly, as AI moves forward, it would be an interesting experiment to start having AI auto-resolve conflicts in the small. (user has been replacing the word taco with burrito, and two users started typing in the same spot TaBurrcoito. Maybe Burrito would win.

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