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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?

#371

Post by ksynwa »

jonahx wrote: post #329
Eisenstein wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you say 'basic economics' but actually mean 'ideal free market'. Economics is the science of economies, which do not have to be free or market based. The problem with people's basic understanding of free markets is that it is heavily simplified. We are looking at it from the perspective of 'what if human nature wasn't ever a problem, everyone was always perfectly rational, and everyone had all of the informat…

You've made a general argument that shows not all theoretical economic theories about free markets can be trusted. Fair enough. But my claim is much narrower. It merely relies on the love of money of real people in our current economy, and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would find and pay for products that don't screw their privacy, control, etc. I think both those premi…

> and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would

That's a terrible premise. Why are you assuming that this flow exists and that billions of people are failing individually rather than the simpler one this flow not existing?

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

#372

Post by Eisenstein »

jonahx wrote: post #360
Eisenstein wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying that because people are being screwed in the current market that is undeniable proof that people are OK with being screwed by the market? If I misunderstand you please correct me. If that is what you contend, then you have no addressed whether or not the market allows them to do otherwise. You take for granted that the market is free and that people are willingly choosing this outcome with perfect k…

You are making all these theoretical points... do you doubt that people are demonstrably lazy and willing to give up their privacy and control for free or cheap or convenient stuff? I don't see how this is even a contentious point to make. You're bringing up all these theoretical counterpoints that either obviously don't apply, or only apply very partially. There are many local only, FOSS options available for every…

Right, I guess am focusing more on your using the 'economics' as proof that it is a people problem, because I see it used that way all the time without regard to structures and human elements. Basically people use 'but the market is obviously working so it must just be the way it is'. They see it as the result of a theoretical market structure in which people make purely rational decisions in their best interest on an even playing field with everyone else, instead of a situation which is affected by laws (or lack of them), specific cultural events, and psychology among many other things.

Sorry if I was talking past you instead of with you, but I have to say that I don't think it is fair to call my responses 'theoretical counterpoints'. What I am doing is pointing out that on the face of your claim, you are engaging in what could reasonably be called 'begging the question'. That is, assuming the conclusion in your own argument without actually showing that that conclusion has a logical basis. Saying 'the current situation exists, and because people have mechanisms by which they can affect that situation that means they are in complete control of the situation' is not logically valid unless you can account for those things which they do not have mechanisms to control being irrelevant to the outcome.

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

#373

Post by zovirl »

motorest wrote: post #365
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Technically an algorithm that lets the last writer win is a CRDT because there is no conflict. Your comment shows some ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain. The whole point of CRDTs is that the set o operations supported is designed to ensure that conflict handling is consistent and deterministic across nodes,and the state of all nodes involved automatically converge to the same state. La…

I think the parent was complaining about mentions of CRDTs which don’t acknowledge that the problem domain CRDTs work in is very low level, and don’t mention how much additional effort is needed to make merging work in a way that’s useful for users.

This article is a perfect example: it says syncing is a challenge for local-first apps, logical clocks and CRDTs are the solution, and then just ends. It ignores the elephant in the room: CRDTs get you consistency, but consistency isn’t enough.

Take a local-first text editor, for example: a CRDT ensures all nodes eventually converge on the same text, but doesn’t guarantee the meaning or structure is preserved. Maybe the text was valid English, or JSON, or alphabetized, but after the merge, it may not be.

My suspicion, and I might be going out on a limb here, is that articles don’t talk about this because there is no good solution to merging for offline or local-first apps. My reasoning is that if there was a good solution, git would adopt it. The fact that git stills makes me resolve merge conflicts manually makes me think no one has found a better way.

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

#374

Post by czx111331 »

canadiantim wrote: post #358
czx111331 wrote: post #100

I believe that in the right contexts—specifically where eventual consistency is acceptable—the local-first paradigm is highly valuable and will gradually become mainstream. A major factor limiting adoption today is that existing local-first solutions are incomplete: when building such applications, developers must handle many problems that are trivial under strong-consistency or traditional models. This raises the le…

Loro is very cool. I'm currently testing out building with it. Hadn't seen loro-mirror before, looks very nice too. Is loro-mirror supposed to be used with rich text editors like prosemirror, etc.? Thanks for your great work with loro

loro-prosemirror[1] offers much better support for integrating Loro with ProseMirror/Tiptap.

In theory, loro-mirror could also be used to integrate Loro with other rich-text editors, but that wasn’t its original design goal and it may need further refinement to work well.

[1] https://github.com/loro-dev/loro-prosemirror

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

#375

Post by mcv »

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…

This is the big reason why I prefer OSM apps. They all download the maps, and your map will work regardless of connectivity.

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

#376

Post by materielle »

tonymet wrote: post #332
m463 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no major changes to the app design I'm pretty convinced they just want more data. for example, apple allows offline maps, but they expire the data because they want you dependent on them. I'm pretty sure the tesla (google) tile data has hidden motives.

I've also wondered. Having worked on similar apps, I think it's usually due to a bug where data is inconsistent , someone important complains, so the devs just invalidate all data to prevent the bug ever happening again. Inconsistent/stale data is more evident during testing than the caching issues (testers are usually using stable office wifi)

It doesn’t even have to be a bug. Having some rule like “invalidate all data older than 6 months” makes it easier to reason about and test for backwards compatibility.

I’m sure the data format of Apple Maps is constantly changing to support new features and optimizations.

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

#377

Post by yccs27 »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #347
rogerrogerr wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never really thought about this - how does Outlook handle this? Has anyone received a “sorry, that room you reserved actually wasn’t available; talk to this other dude who reserved it too” message after reserving a meeting room? Or does it just double book the room? Or is there a global lock on any transaction affecting a meeting room, so only one goes through? (Feels like it doesn’t scale)

In Google Workspace, rooms are resources with calendars that can be configured to auto accept any invitation unless they’ve already booked. So it’s basically first come first serve. Even if two people are literally trying to book the room, at the same time, simultaneously, one request will go through first and will be accepted and the second will be declined. I imagine outlook is similar.

In other words, Google sacrifices availability/latency here - they don't accept the request until they can be sure it's still available.

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

#378

Post by mcv »

pabs3 wrote: post #354
Archelaos wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Might be better to switch to the CoMaps fork: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-07-03/Announcing-Navigate-w...

Interestingly, f-droid doesn't initially show CoMaps but does show Organic Maps because apparently CoMaps doesn't pass an antifeature filter for depending on a tethered service on codeberg. I don't quite understand why this is an issue; they both need to download their maps from somewhere, don't they?

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

#379

Post by mcv »

LanceH wrote: post #351
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The details appear to be not giving a damn about changes to data. I personally wouldn't describe that as "converging". As it says, this is "Last Write Wins", which is great if the last writer is always correct. "If it’s older → ignore" -- yea, I guess that's a solution but I would really have to look for the problem. I've gone down this road and considered github (or similar) as the backing database. In the end, I ju…

Funny thing is that the article gives an example where "last write wins" is quite clearly a bad solution.

Balance = 100 A: balance = 120 B: balance = 80

Clearly, these are transactions, and it doesn't matter in which order they're applied, but it does matter that they're both executed. End balance should be 100, not 80 or 120.

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

#380

Post by friendzis »

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.

Good luck finding vendor that supports isolation of tenants with sensitive data.
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