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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?

#311

Post by Aurornis »

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…

Almost every time I see CRDTs mentioned it’s used as a magic device that makes conflicts disappear. The details, of course, are not mentioned.

Technically an algorithm that lets the last writer win is a CRDT because there is no conflict.

Making a true system that automatically merges data while respecting user intent and expectations can be an extremely hard problem for anything complex like text.

Another problem is that in some situations using a CRDT to make the conflict disappear isn’t even the right approach. If two users schedule a meeting for the same open meeting room, you can’t avoid issues with an algorithm. You need to let them know about the conflict so they can resolve the issue.

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

#312

Post by kazinator »

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…

One solution is to make it so that people see their literal keystrokes in real time. Then they solve the conflict themselves. Like, "stop typing into this text because bob is typing into it".

It's like Ethernet conflict resolution: just access the shared medium and detect collisions in real time.

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

#313

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> 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 ?

I worked on a somewhat well-known (at the time) product that used on-site hosting.

One of our biggest customer complaints was that we didn’t have a cloud hosted option. Many companies didn’t want to self-host. They’d happily pay a premium to not have to host it.

I think HN underestimates the demand for cloud hosted solutions. Companies don’t want to deal with self-hosted if they can pay someone else a monthly fee to do it.

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

#314

Post by dibrale »

I prize local execution for confidentiality and trust reasons, but this mindset seems to put me in a distinct minority. I've just accepted that I will end up having to build my own solutions from time to time.

That said, 'local' can mean a number of different things. On-device local, LAN local, intranet local... You get the idea. I chose to go with an approach of: 'assume resources are constrained and build for that'.

The result was a local-first agentic system (https://github.com/dibrale/Regions) that uses explicit resource sharing and execution patterns to make use of arbitrarily distributed compute. That way, local can be whatever I want it to be, so long as there's an endpoint.

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

#315

Post by quotemstr »

kobieps wrote: post #280
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…

Agreed @ not for the faint of heart. There is at least one alternative "CRDT-free" approach for the less brave among us: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

> Difference from CRDTs

The author has made a CRDT. He denies that his algorithm constitutes a CRDT. It's a straightforward merge, not a "fancy algorithm".

What specific aspect of a CRDT does this solution not satisfy? The C? The R? The D? The T?

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

#316

Post by rkomorn »

Aurornis wrote: post #313
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…

> 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 ? I worked on a somewhat well-known (at the time) product that used on-site hosting. One of our biggest customer complaints was that we didn’t have a cloud hosted option. Many companies didn’t want to self-host. They’d happi…

I can't imagine wanting to self-host something like Jira, GitHub, or some wiki product unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment.

Otherwise it seems like I'm just spending time and effort achieving the exact same result.

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

#317

Post by flymasterv »

gorfian_robot wrote: post #150
andsoitis wrote: post #124

Lotus Notes and later Groove Networks (both brought to us courtesy Ray Ozzie) both provided a platform to create apps with data synchronizing as a first-class citizen. The technology behind Groove now powers OneDrive and Microsoft 365. Notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes Groove: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks

Groove was cool for a hot minute before MS got their grubby hands on it

I had my first internship at Groove. I did a ton of the I18n work, and something with the chess demo.

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

#318

Post by dtkav »

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 building a file-over-app local-first app call Relay [0] (it makes Obsidian real-time collaborative) and I agree with you.

We have a business model that I think is kind of novel (I am biased) -- we split our service into a "global identity layer"/control plane and "Relay Servers" which are open source and self-hostable. Our Obsidian Plugin is also open source.

So while we have a SaaS, we encourage our users to self-host on private networks (eg. tailscale) so that we are totally unable to see their documents and attachments. We don't require any network connection between the Relay Server and our service.

Similar to tailscale, the global identity layer provides value because people want SSO and straightforward permissions management (which are a pain to self-host), but running the Relay Server is dead simple.

So far we are getting some traction with businesses who want a best-in-class writing experience (Obsidian), google-docs-like collaboration, but local-first. This is of particular interest to companies in AI or AI safety (let's not send our docs to our competitors...), or for compliance/security reasons.

[0] https://relay.md

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

#319

Post by Archelaos »

pkaye wrote: post #310
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.

I can recommend organic maps: https://organicmaps.app

The quality of the maps depends on the region, though. But for me it is typically good enough. I not only like the local maps, but also that I can save waypoints locally. And I can contribute things like points of interest to Open Street Map directly via the app. In my opinion, the biggest disadvantage is that there is no traffic information.

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

#320

Post by nightfly »

rkomorn wrote: post #316
Aurornis wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ? I worked on a somewhat well-known (at the time) product that used on-site hosting. One of our biggest customer complaints was that we didn’t have a cloud hosted option. Many companies didn’t want to self-host. They’d happi…

I can't imagine wanting to self-host something like Jira, GitHub, or some wiki product unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment. Otherwise it seems like I'm just spending time and effort achieving the exact same result.

I work in an org with 8ish FTEs, a handful of student workers, and like 200 volunteers. Almost every service wants $5 or more per user per month, that's $1,140 per month per service. We selfhost open source solutions for everything we can and sometimes have to write something in-house to meet our needs.
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