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Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

marcobambini.substack.com

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

#471

Post by cyberax »

kobieps wrote: post #463
cyberax wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who is the audience of your app? Is it an internal app for a company, or is it a public facing consumer app?

Public app used by professionals in the field, often with poor or no connectivity. Even having a local read-only copy of data is often helpful for them.

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

#472

Post by kazinator »

ongy wrote: post #370
kazinator wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair question; we here being under a submission aout local-first apps, and al. Of course, you know the answer: if you're offline, you're not online. Bob gets to type whatever Bob wants, and until you go online, you don't get to overtype anything.

But the offline enabled property allows exactly that. Both sides type offline and only sync later. Neither would like their change to just be discarded.

I was responding only to the idea of having no conflict resolution: last edit wins (proposedin a great grandparent comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45341335 "We have a local-first app. Our approach? Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins."

if you can see the edits being made in real time, keystroke by keystroke, that pretty much solves that problem.

As for offline editing, either don't support it (then you're not local-anything obviously) or you can have some lame workflow like "the document was changed by another user ..."

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

#473

Post by immibis »

MangoToupe wrote: post #222
Jaxan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the other way around!

I don't understand what you appear to view as obvious. Can you explain? All you need is a way to resolve conflicts and you can serialize any distributed set of actions to a log.

All you need is a time machine and then you can prevent the holocaust. All you need is a philosopher's stone and then immortality is within your grasp. All you need is an infinite source of energy and then the finiteness of the universe need not concern you. All you need is a magic genie granting infinite wishes and you can end world hunger.

If all you need to solve a problem is something impossible, then you haven't solved it.

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

#474

Post by m463 »

materielle wrote: post #376
tonymet wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

apple maps data expires after 30 days.

if you create offline maps for some vacation away from reliable cellphone service, when 30 days passes the (gigabytes of) maps just disappear. Unusable even if you are in a remote village.

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

#475

Post by kobieps »

cyberax wrote: post #471
kobieps wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is the audience of your app? Is it an internal app for a company, or is it a public facing consumer app?

Public app used by professionals in the field, often with poor or no connectivity. Even having a local read-only copy of data is often helpful for them.

Cool. Yeah in my experience last-write-wins is sufficient for 95% of use cases, and if you add audit trails to help resolve any disputes it gets you to 98%

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

#476

Post by xmprt »

account42 wrote: post #415
xmprt wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a win for the user. The user is tricked into paying more than a fair price by deceptive business practices. The word for that is fraud, but somehow it's OK because everyone does it.

> paying more than a fair price by deceptive business practices

I see product X is $10/month. I subscribe. I'm not sure where the deception is there? The alternative is likely either the cost of the product is exorbitantly high like $500 for lifetime. Or the developer makes it more affordable but sales peter out and they end up having to go out of business and can't afford to maintain the product after a couple of years. Likely both. And hackernews will complain either way.

The only sustainable model I've seen is lifetime licenses but updates for a single year.

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

#477

Post by Ostrogoth »

Archelaos wrote: post #319
pkaye wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another vote for Organic Maps. I use it as a lightweight maps app for backcountry or traveling in foreign countries where I don’t have a sim card. You can also record tracks in the app, or import .gpx files. In airplane mode it has low impact on battery consumption.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find out iOS Star Chart app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/star-chart/id345542655) functions entirely offline. Recently used it while camping, and it just needed a GPS coordinates fix to adjust sky map to location.

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

#478

Post by Ostrogoth »

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...

Thanks for recommending. I was not aware that a fork of Organic Maps had been created, or that longtime contributors to OM had concerns about the project.

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

#479

Post by palata »

rkomorn wrote: post #425
palata wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever checked the cost of GitHub runners? Quickly offsets self-hosting ones.

Runners? Yes. There are definitely some compute/resource heavy things that are more efficient to self host. Until you run out of capacity and getting more capacity involves something like having go buy more hardware and data center space (which I've had to do, though not for CI reasons specifically). GPU-heavy tasks were also heavily in favor of buying hardware and self-hosting at the time I was making purchasing dec…

I didn't say you were wrong, I was just mentioning that I was absolutely amazed when I discovered how much my startup was spending in GitHub runners.

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

#480

Post by nenenejej »

account42 wrote: post #408
nenenejej wrote: post #202

Earlier 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…

Making people dependent on a cloud subscription isn't exactly in the spirit of spreading offline programs...

Dependent isn't the intent here. Obviously big corps are incentivised to do that so there is that danger. But ideally it is all based on open standards.
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