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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?

#481

Post by em-bee »

robmccoll wrote: post #34

I wonder about the categories of apps for which offline first with potentially infinitely delayed sync provides a better experience and how large those really are. It seems like most of those are apps where I'm creating or working on something by myself and then sharing it later. The online part is almost the nice-to-have. A lot of other apps are either near-real-time-to-real-time communication where I want sending t…

you are missing one key aspect: high latency. i am in a rural area with bad internet access. especially bad latency. every request to hackernews for example takes seconds. even if it doesn't make sense for hackernews to be offline. updating new messages, posting replies, upvotes, downvotes. etc, would all work better if they happened in the background, so that i don't have to wait for them.

that's why local first also makes sense for server bound applications. it's not offline first, but by moving online activities into the background, all my interaction with the site would be snappy and smooth, and i could read and comment and move on to the next action without waiting for the browser to reload the page

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

#482

Post by Arch-TK »

account42 wrote: post #402
Arch-TK wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either people are broadly ok with being screwed (my personal experience suggests this) or there is a grand conspiracy to prevent anyone who is not screwing their customers from competing in the market. Maybe it is the latter, who knows. But what I do know is that the non-screwing options exist, but are often less popular and more expensive (either in price, time, or effort). And this annoys me to no end. Because _I_…

It's not that people are OK with being screwed over but rather that they have been conditioned into being helpless about it. Big corporations hire psychological experts that know exactly how to manipulate you into thinking you need their products or otherwise act against your own best interests, whether that's through advertisement, peer pressure or whatever else they can come up with. You yourself admit that while y…

> Presumably you also often choose being screwed over being socially ostracised?

No, I only choose being screwed over being homeless, or jobless.

Which didn't use to be a particularly likely scenario but the tides are turning.

I don't care about being socially ostracised for refusing to ever use WhatsApp for example.

We teach children not to cave to peer pressure as if it was a choice they could make, and now you're claiming that caving to peer pressure is not something people choose.

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

#483

Post by throw10920 »

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

Citation needed.

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

#484

Post by rkomorn »

palata wrote: post #479
rkomorn wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure. Everything metered on time scales up shockingly quickly (cost-wise).

In general, I do prefer fixed costs, so self-hosting resource-intensive things makes sense.

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

#485

Post by jjcob »

api wrote: post #442
jjcob wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a technical challenge, it's a fundamental problem. When multiple people work on a document at the same time, you will have conflicts that will become very hard to resolve. I have never seen a good UI for resolving non-trivial changes. There is no way to make this merging easy. The only way to avoid the merge problem is to make sure that the state is synchronised before making changes. With cloud based soluti…

It’s barely different from having multiple fat single page web apps editing a file in the cloud. All of those have local replicas of the data and present as if everyone is editing at once. There are multiple ways to do this, like CRDTs plus raft based leader signaling for conflict resolution. The latter signaling requires almost no bandwidth. Raft based time skew adjustment works too if your problem domain can accept…

All these algorithms arent going to help if user A changes a headline from Arial to Helvetica while user B changes it to Helvetica Neue.

There is no way to tell which of the changes should win.

That's why most applications decided to require users be online for edits. when you have to be online, the chance of simultaneous edits becomes so small that you can just show an error message instead of trying to merge.

The online requirement also ensures that you are notified of conflicts immediately, which is vastly preferable to users. Nothing worse than working on a document for hours and discovering someone else also worked on the same document and now you have two edited copies that someone needs to consolidate.

That's the reason why offline first is becoming increasingly unpopular.

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

#486

Post by jjcob »

isaachinman wrote: post #118
jjcob wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMAP works fine until you try to continue working on a draft email that you started on another computer... somehow it always gets broken and I end up with 5 copies of the message in the drafts folder...

We fixed this at Marco, FYI. https://marcoapp.io

How?

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

#487

Post by raxxorraxor »

rkomorn wrote: post #440
raxxorraxor wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Gitea is superior to Github to organize your repos. I deploy it in the corp I work for too and everyone is very happy with it. It is blazingly fast running on a small virtual machine. Granted, this is a business that needs on-premise infrastructure anyway because we have inhouse production. So we have a domain controller that can be used for everything auth. We use a combination of that and Entra (shitty name…

For me it's just a question of where I would want to invest my org's time. For example: how much time do I want us to spend looking after a task/ticketing system? About zero. How much time do I want my org to invest in DR planning for our self-hosted wiki? About zero. So unless there's a convincing difference (cost, features, etc), cloud-hosted SaaS would be my choice there. The answers also probably change a lot bas…

I think some time investment is very sensible for any form of decision about infrastructure. Today we have companies complaining about their software dependence, software license costs have heavily increased.

Also, an experienced admin can setup a repository server in a day. This is probably even less time investment than getting offers for solutions. In my opinion the maintenance amount isn't less with SaaS at all as most maintenance work is integrating data.

We do have a self-hosted wiki. We don't even need to think about it if we want to integrate document search or analysis. We own our data completely here and I would argue that data is quite an important chunk of wealth for a company. Some SaaS companies know that as well and they basically take your data hostage. And as a plus, as many things are on a local network, any access to that data is pretty much instant.

To save time on infrastructure decision overall is a mistake in my opinion. You wouldn't do that for your ERP or CRM solutions either.

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

#488

Post by moggers123 »

cyberax wrote: post #342
moggers123 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 interv…

Sure. But then you need to notify users when they come back online that there's a conflict, so they can resolve what to do. You likely need to have a report on the frequency of such occasions for the managers, and so on. These kinds of conflicts simply can not be solved by CRDTs or any other automated process. The application has to be designed around that. > In principle, local-first to me means each instance (and t…

I doubt you'll ever see this.. Oh well..

I probably should have been explicit in that I'm not arguing in favor of CRDTs, just that the adverse doesn't need to be "send it and accept the collateral".

Draw The Rest Of The Owl energy here, but at least its a nice northern star.

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

#489

Post by workfromspace »

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.

As a frequent traveller I can say Google Maps (offline mode) sucks!

If you are fully offline, then it works as intended.

However, if you have even a tiny bit of connection, even if your connection is spotty or very slow, Google Maps refuses to use its offline data, crippling the experience and making it unusable.

I agree with the sibling comment. When I travel, I usually use 3 apps and download the offline maps of the regions I visit: Apple Maps (for iOS apps and embedded features), Google Maps, and thank god: Organic Maps.

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

#490

Post by dusted »

jonahx wrote: post #323
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…

> 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 ? That argument flies in the face of basic economics. The problem is that the people don't seem to care about being screwed. If they did, it would very profitable to provide the non-screwing, and lots of people would. The optimist in me believes this is a just…

> That argument flies in the face of basic economics.

The first think any economist will tell you about the foundational rationale of basic economics is it's inability to explain the discrepancy between behavior as predicted by basic economics and behavior as carried out by human beings in the actual real world.

The hard truth that I, a human, do not behave rationally and in my own best interest at all time, or at least in those situations in which the risk or benefit to myself is the greatest, is a hard one to swallow, and many people are innately unable to even consider swallowing that, and as a result, to maintain their own illusion of rationality, they must take the stance that humans are as a rule, rational and therefore will act rationally and in their own best interest, if nothing else, as a preemptive defense against the question "if everyone around you is irrational, then what's the chance that you're the only rational one?"

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