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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?

#281

Post by bsder »

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…

> I believe the lack of popularity is more of an economics problem.

It's also a programming complexity problem.

A local-first app has to run on a zillion different configurations of hardware. A cloud-first app only has to run on a single configuration and the thing running on the user hardware is just a view into that singular cloud representation.

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

#282

Post by crazygringo »

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, "conflict-free" is from a theoretical perspective, that it always generates a final result guaranteed to match. Which, to be fair, is an accomplishment in and of itself, when the operations might be out of order or repeated.

It is absolutely not "conflict-free" from the user perspective, nor is it even necessarily logical. Tools like Google Docs manage this by providing a version history so if the merge messes up, you can still go back and see each recent change to grab whatever data got lost.

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

#283

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

crazygringo wrote: post #276
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #264

Perhaps 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.

The context should be clear that this is talking exclusively about apps that store their data in the cloud. Local-first here means starting with a local data model that syncs to the cloud from the start, rather than an app that only works online.

What are some examples of popular apps that do this which aren't web apps, and could feasibly work offline? Every native app I use is local-first. Eg. Photoshop, Blender, Figma, Xcode, Zed, Kitty, Affinity Photo/Designer, Notes, Music, Calendar, Messenger, Maps, Email, etc.

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

#284

Post by tonymet »

I wish we could get app developers to stop going online for every piece of content. Even my Tesla GPS map refuses to cache tiles it already has, so when connectivity goes down, my maps are blank.

Or streaming media apps (like Peacock & Kanopy) reloading the previous screen from the server instead of keeping the rendered media list object resident.

95% of the content is already on the device, let's please encourage it's use.

Dirty writes can be handled easily just mark the UI dirty until the write succeeds.

My point is that we could easily fix 95% of the offline challenges with no major changes to the app design -- just better habits.

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

#285

Post by xmprt »

roncesvalles wrote: post #244
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…

I'm not really sure about this because far too often I see ads for various services/courses/etc that I want to buy, but I don't end up buying because it's a subscription and I just don't have the bandwidth currently to spend time on the thing. I want to buy it and keep it on my shelf until I find the time to get to it, like a book. And the price they give me from clicking the ad is a limited-time discount so then I'm…

You're not the average person. You probably also don't have significant credit card debt or rely on buy-now-pay-later for making purchases. Subscriptions are a win-win for the average company and user - users pay less upfront when evaluating the product, and companies can rely on a steady cash flow to continue paying for development and ongoing maintenance costs.

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

#286

Post by to11mtm »

1123581321 wrote: post #255

There is increasing awareness of CRDTs but it’s still unclear to many developers how to integrate them with sql. It seems like a CRDT requires developing a new app, or at least a new data model, rather than benefitting from their existing knowledge. This should change over time; the libraries and documentation keep getting better. I recommend Automerge 3.0’s documentation as an introduction to the concepts and how to…

I think the biggest challenge is brownfield.

In greenfield it's easier (so long as you have the grit to build the base pattern); Events get put into tables (TBH this can be optional, but if you're new to it just do it b/c it will make debugging easier,) and if you want a friendly clean 'view' state you have some form of map-reduce replication running on the event set.

And yeah you can even remix that idea to work on 'existing' tables but it's gonna be more work and you'll probably want some form of optimistic concurrency check...

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

#287

Post by themafia »

tonymet wrote: post #284

I wish we could get app developers to stop going online for every piece of content. Even my Tesla GPS map refuses to cache tiles it already has, so when connectivity goes down, my maps are blank. Or streaming media apps (like Peacock & Kanopy) reloading the previous screen from the server instead of keeping the rendered media list object resident. 95% of the content is already on the device, let's please encourage it…

We solved a ton of issues by ensuring Cache-Control was being correctly used on API responses and that our application network layer respected them. The advantage is we can change our mind about cache lifetimes on the server side and no app update is required to start using them.

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

#288

Post by tonymet »

themafia wrote: post #287
tonymet wrote: post #284

I wish we could get app developers to stop going online for every piece of content. Even my Tesla GPS map refuses to cache tiles it already has, so when connectivity goes down, my maps are blank. Or streaming media apps (like Peacock & Kanopy) reloading the previous screen from the server instead of keeping the rendered media list object resident. 95% of the content is already on the device, let's please encourage it…

We solved a ton of issues by ensuring Cache-Control was being correctly used on API responses and that our application network layer respected them. The advantage is we can change our mind about cache lifetimes on the server side and no app update is required to start using them.

I love hearing about easy wins like this. very true on Android and iOS the Data Access Objects will handle content invalidation quite magically when used properly.

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

#289

Post by degamad »

birdfood wrote: post #267

I’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)…

"Without using a server" is possible, but hard.

An alternative is "using a server that the user has", e.g. saving to their iCloud/Dropbox/Google Drive/GitHub/etc.

(There used to be old notes applications which would save your notes in an IMAP folder on your email server; almost every user of your app will have email.)

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

#290

Post by VikingCoder »

michaelsalim wrote: post #245
VikingCoder wrote: post #49

I want many more Local-Only apps, thanks. Self-Hosted. Or Federated apps, again Self-Hosted. And I think network infrastructure has been holding us back horribly. I think with something like Tailscale, we can make local-only apps or federated apps way, way easier to write.

Agreed. I'm building a presentation software[1] so it needs to work locally (can't afford lost of connection). But I also want it to be accessible from anywhere. Unfortunately those two things don't mesh that easily. The tech is getting there though. With things like hole punching or webrtc, P2P is getting pretty easy to implement. Though it's still a challenge to implement it in an actual project. I do believe that…

Really, why not use Tailscale?
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