Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

marcobambini.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 494 posts

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

#231

Post by fruitworks »

kelvinjps wrote: post #176

I think just doing files and then syncing the files with another solution it's okay. For example my local apps: Synthing syncs the files between my computer and phone for Note taking(just markdown and org files) obsidian on my phone, emacs/vim on my PC. Todo and reminders: org mode in emacs (desktop) orgzly on mobile. Password manager: KeePassxc desktop, keepassdx mobile. Calendar: just sync the ics file. Photos: jus…

What do you use to integrate ICS into your phone's calendar. This is what i'm suck on. Apps like icsx5 are read-only for ics

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

#232

Post by montebicyclelo »

> One of the simplest CRDT strategies is Last-Write-Wins (LWW):

> Each update gets a timestamp (physical or logical).

> When two devices write to the same field, the update with the latest timestamp wins.

Please also have a robust synced undo feature, so it's easy to undo the thing you don't want that gets written. Apps that sync often seem to be stingy about how much "undos" they store/sync (if any).

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

#233

Post by jonathanstrange »

arrowtrench wrote: post #178
SilverbeardUnix wrote: post #64

1. People don't work alone and need to collaborate 2. People value convenience over privacy and security 3. Cloud is easy.

Is local-first bad / more difficult for collaboration because of conflict resolution? (E.g., two users edit the same document when they're offline and then, during syncing, they find that their versions diverge too much for them to be merged cleanly.) If so, isn't it possible to mark certain assets as "undivergable" which would effectively mean that the program would act like a traditional cloud-first type of app for…

Merge conflicts arise just as easily in a cloud-first app than in a local-first app once you go beyond any simple "last edit wins" consistency model (and if you have that model, it's also no problem for local-first). What counts as a conflict depends entirely on the data domain in both cases, and that's the hard part.

It's just easier to implement cloud-first because it's just CRUD with a centralized database on a server. It's still extremely hard to reliably connect two apps directly peer to peer without some centralized server as an intermediary and since you need a centralized server anyway and in addition have to do the peer to peer syncing, "local first with syncing" is inherently more complex than just syncing to a master database. But potential merge conflicts are the same in both.

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

#234

Post by dusted »

They used to be really popular, back in the ancient times when I was young and full of excitement for all things compute, almost all software was local-first, and.. only :)

But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ?

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

#235

Post by bongodongobob »

They used to be. But if your app is cloud based, that means the businesses you're selling to don't have to have staff and hardware to manage that stuff on prem and can charge a higher subscription fee. For better or worse.

The pendulum will swing back, I think, for security reasons. "I don't want company X training AI on our data!" (Whatever that means)

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

#237

Post by johannes1234321 »

elzbardico wrote: post #47

Network speeds are of sufficient bandwidth and latency to allow cloud first applications, which are vastly simpler to develop than Local-first whenever you need to add any remote/collaborative feature.

> Network speeds are of sufficient bandwidth and latency

They are, as long as you in reach of a base station.

As soon as you travel through a tunnel, hike outside, are on an airplane or are in Australia with latency to U.S or European servers things are different.

Not to mention choice of being offline, either to disable distraction or for reducing roaming costs for some devices while travelling.

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

#238

Post by alkonaut »

This whole article reads like normal desktop software or mobile apps are some strange edge case of software, rather than still being a super common way of delivering software.

Doing local-first _in a browser_ still feels like taking all the drawbacks of a browser like difficult interop with the rest of the host system and getting only one benefit (ease of distribution).

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

#239

Post by kevincox »

kelvinjps wrote: post #176

I think just doing files and then syncing the files with another solution it's okay. For example my local apps: Synthing syncs the files between my computer and phone for Note taking(just markdown and org files) obsidian on my phone, emacs/vim on my PC. Todo and reminders: org mode in emacs (desktop) orgzly on mobile. Password manager: KeePassxc desktop, keepassdx mobile. Calendar: just sync the ics file. Photos: jus…

The problem is that this has effectively no conflict resolution. With naive file-based sync the best Syncthing can do is save both files. Then you are stuck merging yourself. Maybe if all of your devices are reliably online and you only use one at a time. But eventually you get a delayed sync resulting in a state fork and you end up with a mess.

For photos and some other type of data this likely isn't much of a problem. But for more complex data it definitely is.

Post reply on HN