You mean like Microsoft Office?
Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
261–270 of 494 posts
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#262Earlier 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…
Given the anemic sales of macOS apps vs online subscriptions, I would disagree. I’m sure it’s the same story on windows. Offline only makes sense when your public infrastructure is garbage. Otherwise most people will choose convenience over control.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed. Most often due to divergence in definitions, scope, prior knowledge, assumptions, time frame, budget, share of burden, objective and/or incentives.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#264Perhaps I'm missing something, but aren't local-first apps the overwhelming norm? Like if I think about the apps I use, my friends use etc, most of them are local. Unless the author means "local first web apps", which would make more sense. And I think the oxymoronic nature of a "local first web app" gives a clue as to their unpopularity.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#265Earlier 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…
Given the anemic sales of macOS apps vs online subscriptions, I would disagree. I’m sure it’s the same story on windows. Offline only makes sense when your public infrastructure is garbage. Otherwise most people will choose convenience over control.
Adobe and Microsoft might disagree…
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#266> Offline-first apps sound like the future: ...no more spinning loaders on flaky connections.
Even offline-friendly apps get spinning loaders on flaky connections. Google Docs will be stuck checking to see if a doc has been updated before it loads it, and will only actually open it when I turn on Airplane Mode. Similarly, Spotify will be stuck loading a saved playlist or album because it's trying to load extra information it loads when connected to the internet, and again only Airplane Mode will skip that so it knows it's offline-only.
Flaky connections are the bane of existence of apps that work offline, either because apps want to load extra online-only data whenever possible, or simply ensure everything is synced before taking a big action.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#267I’m building a journaling app primarily for myself but with a view that others might want to use it to. I’ve built it in rails and deployed it. The experience has been great and it’s the first “app” I’ve deployed outside of work. But I haven’t shared it with anyone because I don’t want to be responsible for hosting their data considering the intention of this app. The only “business model” (method of covering costs) I’m interested in is pay to use. I don’t want to do ads or tracking. I think saas is the wrong fit for it. So I’m just this week thinking about making it a macOS / iOS app instead and work out how to do syncing without involving a server.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#268The use case I always think of is the developer experience for regular hobbyist and workaday devs writing their apps with local-first sync. Apple comes close with CloudKit, in that it takes the backend service and makes it generic, basically making it an OS platform API, backed by Apple's own cloud. Basically cloud and app decoupled. But, the fundamental issue remains, in that it's proprietary and only available on A…
Your holy grail is probably Fireproof: https://fireproof.storage/
Open source, uses object storage without a web server dependency, syncs, and has great DX.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#269Doing it properly is just hard. There is also this CRDT craze going around, but in the end I think operational transformation is a more general and flexible solution (CRDT is just a special case of operational transformation). I have been looking at the various solutions in this space for a few years now, and in the last two or three months started implementing my own experimental solution as a database using operational transformation. It doesn't help that operational transformation in the literature is somewhat confused (there are not many papers about it that are actually correct), although in the end it is really simple.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I switched to Immich, I thought I was going to give up a lot for the sake of self hosting. To my surprise, it’s actually better than anything I’ve used from Apple or Google. Unicorns exist, they are just rare.
> Why haven't local-first apps become popular? The Immich "Quick Start" step 1 is mkdir and wget commands. Step 2 is "Populate the .env file with custom values" I get it, when the prerequisites are 1) run a server and 2) have Docker installed, but this isn't inspiring confidence that local-first apps will become popular.
Self-hosted services and local-first apps are distinct topics. Local-first is about keeping data on clients- orchestrated via a centralized or distributed system. Usually it means installing an app that works offline, and might sync to desktop. Self-hosting is about running servers in owned or rented infrastructure, and that is never a turnkey proposition.