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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?

#301

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

robenkleene wrote: post #115
MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #83

The free software evangelist in me says "because local-first gives more to the user of the software," which will tend not to happen when the user is not in control of the software. Realistically the reason is probably that it's easier to make changes if you assume everything is phoning home to the mother ship for everything. Also, an unrelated nit: "Why Local-First Apps Haven’t Become Popular?" is not a question. "Wh…

Apple is practically the most antithetical to "free software" company around, yet Apple maintains perhaps the largest fleet of local-first apps in existence, e.g., off the top of my head: Calendar, Contacts, Keynote, Mail, Notes, Numbers, Photos, and Pages (these are all examples of apps that support multi-device sync and/or real-time collaboration). I think the truth of your statement is more that free software tend…

Maybe the distinction is in that word "app." We started calling programs "apps" when smart phones came out. Smart phones are remote-first, and it makes sense (or it did) as long as you think of a phone as your terminal into... something.

Your examples are all programs that predate mobile, even though they are available on mobile (are they local-first on mobile too?).

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

#302

Post by qzx_pierri »

dusted wrote: post #234

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…

> what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ?

FOSS

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

#303

Post by cyberax »

crazygringo wrote: post #273

> The Solution: CRDTs. The right approach is CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types)... This means you can apply messages in any order, even multiple times, and every device will still converge to the same state. This is very much "draw the rest of the owl". Creating a CRDT model for your data that matches intuitive user expectations and obeys consistent business logic is... not for the faint of heart. Also remem…

We have a local-first app. Our approach?

Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins.

No, really. In practice for most cases the conflicts are either trivial, or impossible. Trivial conflicts like two people modifying the same note are trivial for users, once you have a simple audit log.

And impossible conflicts are impossible to solve automatically anyway and require business processes around them. Example: two people starting to work on the same task in an offline-enabled task tracker.

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

#304

Post by johnnyanmac »

SilverbeardUnix wrote: post #60
canpan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't think replicated data structures are the problem. Look at single player video games, cannot get more ideal for local-first. Still you need a launcher and internet connection.

No you don't. There are plenty of games you can buy and go into the wilderness and play just fine offline. Just because game developers WANT you to be online so they can get data doesn't mean you NEED to be online.

That's what confuses me about this whole topic. If you want a local app, make one. Nothing "requires" online if the features don't drive it.

We drove everything online for logistics and financial reasons. Not because the tech requires online connections for everything. it isn't changing because people don't see always-online as a big enough deterrent to change their habits.

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

#305

Post by Loughla »

mrandish wrote: post #263
Loughla wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assumptions. It's almost always assumptions.

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

#306

Post by mweidner »

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…

> 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

A more robust idea is to store a log of changes in files that are synced with Dropbox/OneDrive/etc. To prevent conflict warnings from Dropbox, you'll want each device to write to a separate file. Readers re-assemble the logs into (some) canonical total order, then reduce over that to get the document state.

The hard part is re-architecting your app to record all changes, instead of just writing out the current state to disk. However, once you do that, it can form the basis for other features like undo/redo, a view of the file's history, etc.

(The changes don't need to be CRDT/OT messages - anything deterministic works, though it's a good idea to make them "rebase-able", i.e., they will still do something reasonable when replayed on top of a collaborator's concurrent changes.)

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

#307

Post by johnnyanmac »

bsder wrote: post #281
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.

It's not easy, but if the money flowed that way devs would figure stuff out. As is, devs who may have an interest in working on it will simply be rejected.

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

#308

Post by moggers123 »

cyberax wrote: post #303
crazygringo wrote: post #273

> The Solution: CRDTs. The right approach is CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types)... This means you can apply messages in any order, even multiple times, and every device will still converge to the same state. This is very much "draw the rest of the owl". Creating a CRDT model for your data that matches intuitive user expectations and obeys consistent business logic is... not for the faint of heart. Also remem…

We have a local-first app. Our approach? Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins. No, really. In practice for most cases the conflicts are either trivial, or impossible. Trivial conflicts like two people modifying the same note are trivial for users, once you have a simple audit log. And impossible conflicts are impossible to solve automatically anyway and require business processes around them. Example: two…

>Example: two people starting to work on the same task in an offline-enabled task tracker. Wouldn't this just mean both people are working on it?

I agree that this means humans intervening.. It sounds like there was a comms breakdown. But rather than doing a first-in-best-dressed, it sounds like accurately recording that both users are in fact working on the same thing is the best option since it surfaces that intervention is required (or maybe its intentional, tools insisting that only one person can work on an item at once annoys me). Sounds much better than quietly blowing away one of the user's changes.

In principle, local-first to me means each instance (and the actions each user carries out on their instance) is sacrosanct. Server's job is to collate it, not decide what the Truth is (by first-in-best-dressed or otherwise).

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

#309

Post by johnnyanmac »

zahlman wrote: post #293
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.

> Like if I think about the apps I use, my friends use etc, most of them are local. Ones that you have to pay for directly? Aside from game devs it's hard for me to think of who the major players are in that space any more. And now even when the game has a single-player mode it seems to demand an Internet connection, whether for DRM reasons, "anti-cheat" (why do you care?), updates etc.

They aren't major players, but there are still plenty of apps that are more "app with options to save to cloud" than "thin client with maybe some caching options". A quick skim on my phone shows it mostly pertains to apps that connect to other hardware (my router/modem and smart bulb, for instance), utility apps (file exploreres, calculators, and task lists), and local media apps.

But one enables continual revenues streams and the other succumbed to extremely rampant piracy in the app space. As such, even many games on mobile are service games rather than a local single player game.

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

#310

Post by pkaye »

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…

Google maps (on my Android) actually has offline maps for a while now but you have to manually select the region. And you can cache multiple regions at once. I've used it in the past when driving to national parks and remote areas with no phone network in some spots.
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