Why haven't local-first apps become popular? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by MangoToupe » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

AlienRobot wrote: post #215

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…

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

How do these services resolve conflicts?

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

#222

Post by MangoToupe » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:47 PM UTC

Jaxan wrote: post #148

MangoToupe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But not the other way around!

I don't understand what you appear to view as obvious. Can you explain?

All you need is a way to resolve conflicts and you can serialize any distributed set of actions to a log.

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

#223

Post by mrtesthah » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:47 PM UTC

Standard notes is a good example of a local-first web app that it super-easy to use without a sign-up.

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

#224

Post by cadamsdotcom » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:47 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #212

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.

Building and securing local first is definitely harder than four-nines.

Want 99.99% uptime? Easy.

Cloudflare, AWS, fly.io, Vercel etc. have poured decades of person-years of engineering into platform reliability and operational excellence so you can get it with a few quick CLI commands.

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

#225

Post by Loughla » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:48 PM UTC

RicoElectrico wrote: post #200

godshatter wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

We're living in the world of Dubai chocolate and labubu so this tells you everything you need to know about consumer behavior.

Fads and trends have always existed. Literally as long as we've had culture.

What point are you trying to make?

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

#226

Post by Loughla » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #194

Reubachi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is correct, but OP is correct. There are currently tens of thousands of games that are unplayable due to requiring pinging to a network/patch server which long ago was deprecated. Forsaking patch requirements, just as many games are no longer playable due to incompatibility/abandoned OS, codebase, gamebreaking bugs. In both of these scenarios, my "lifetime license" is no longer usable through no action of…

I think this thread is an example of a fascinating class of miscommunication I've observed on HN, but I want to say it out loud to see if I'm understanding it. Two people meet in an HN thread, and they both dislike the status quo in a particular way (e.g. that copyright is awful, DRMed games suck, whatever). They both want to fight back against the thing that they dislike, but they do it in different ways. One person…

Welcome to people management. Communication and miscommunication is about 99.999% of it.

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

#227

Post by sehugg » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:55 PM UTC

It doesn't help that app developers don't have a clear idea of how long persistent data will be kept around, as eviction policies are based on complex and often-changing rules/heuristics, despite the availability of navigator.storage APIs.

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

#228

Post by moffkalast » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:58 PM UTC

xorvoid wrote: post #23

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…

Agreed. In the pre-internet days you had rigid version releases, there was a time investment in version 1, it released, people bought it and used it, no bugfixes, patches or anything. Then a year or two later, there was version 2, and you could buy that to get the improvements, or just use your old version just fine.

That sort of model collapses where software needs to be constantly updated and maintained lest it rots and dies as the rest of the ecosystem evolves and something dynamically linked changes by a hair. So what's left is either doing that maintenance for free, i.e. FOSS, or charging for it on a monthly basis like SAAS. We've mostly done this bullshit to ourselves in the name of fast updates and security. Maybe it was inevitable.

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

#229

Post by Loughla » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 8:59 PM UTC

JustExAWS wrote: post #139

sylens wrote: post #66

There's no money in making a local first app. Businesses want your data, they want you to be dependent on them, and they want to be able to monetize your behavior and attention

Today you can still buy Microsoft Office as a one time purchase.

But it still prompts you to sign into your account and "finish setting up Windows" by using onedrive and whatever other cloud bullshit.

And it will continue to do that forever.

Source: when we lose power and the machine restarts unexpectedly, I die a little inside when it goes to the windows set up screen just because I haven't signed in to a Microsoft account.

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

#230

Post by DotaFan » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

Been working on offline apps (Android) for the past couple of years. Syncing is hard. Some takes:

- There was never a budget for CRDT's

- Conflicts were never our primary focus, instead our focus were business problems

- Event-sourced arch + offline first app was quite a fun. Basically I've recorded all the events in sequence in SQLite, queued them up when there was a connection and had network retry policy in place + reverting an event locally if retry failed n-th amount of times.