Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

marcobambini.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 494 posts

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

#61

Post by antonvs »

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…

This is the primary reason. The heaviest push for SaaS came from Silicon Valley, which wanted a recurring revenue stream model.

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

#63

Post by api »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #25
api wrote: post #8

I feel like a broken record here: it is not an engineering problem. Local-first and decentralized apps haven't become popular because SaaS has a vastly superior economic model, and more money means more to be invested in both polish (UI/UX) and marketing. All the technical challenges of decentralized or local-first apps are solvable. They are no harder than the technical challenges of doing cloud at scale. If there w…

Cloud SaaS services are often extremely heavily marketed, too, often with a VC-backed ad spend pool. That’s difficult if impossible to compete with. There’s also an upcoming generation that doesn’t know what a filesystem is which also doesn’t help matters.

> There’s also an upcoming generation that doesn’t know what a filesystem is which also doesn’t help matters.

This is why I sometimes think it's hopeless. For a while there -- 90s into the 2000s -- we were building something called "computer literacy." Then the phones came out and that stopped completely. Now we seem to have inverted the old paradigm. In that era people made jokes about old people not being able to use tech. Today the older people (30s onward) are the ones who can use tech and the younger people can only use app centric mobile style interfaces.

The future is gonna be like: "Hey grandpa, can you help me figure out why my wifi is down?"

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #24
lordnacho wrote: post #12

Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls But also nowadays you want to have information from other computers. Everything from shared calendars to the weather, or a social media entry. There's so much more you can do with internet access, you need to be able to access re…

> There's no easy way to keep sync, either. Look at CAP theorem. You can decide which leg you can do without, but you can't solve the distributed computing "problem". Best is just be aware of what tradeoff you're making. Git has largely solved asynchronous decentralized collaboration, but it requires file formats that are ideally as human understandable as machine-readable, or at least diffable/mergable in a way wher…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by russnewcomer »

I'm not sure CRDTs are actually the right answer here for your example of #2, Marco. A double-entry accounting system might actually be more ideal. In that case, what you are keeping in sync is the ledger, but depending on your use-case, that might actually be easier since you can treat them as a stream-of-data, and you would get the 'correct' answer of 100.

In this case, you would need two accounts, a credit and debit account, and then device A would write +20 to the credit account and -20 to the debit account, device B would write -20 to the credit account and +20 to the debit account, then using a HLC (or even not, depending on what your use-case is again), you get back to the 100 that seems from the description of the problem that it is the correct answer.

Obviously, if you are editing texts there are very different needs, but this as described is right in the wheelhouse of double-entry accounting.

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

#68

Post by bluGill »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls But also nowadays you want to have information from other computers. Everything from shared calendars to the weather, or a social media entry. There's so much more you can do with internet access, you need to be able to access re…

We have gone back and forth several times in history.

It started with single computers, but they were so expensive nobody had them except labs. You wrote the program with your data, often toggling it in with switches.

From there we went to batch processing, then shared computers, then added a networking, with file sharing and RPC. Then the personal computer came and it was back to toggling your own programs, but soon we were running local apps, and now our computers are again mostly "smart terminals" (as opposed to dumb terminals), and the data is on shared computers again.

Sometimes we take data off the shared computer, but there is no perfect solution so distributed computing and since networks are mostly reliable nobody wants that anyway. What we do want is control of our data and that we don't get (mostly)

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

#70

Post by dustingetz »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls But also nowadays you want to have information from other computers. Everything from shared calendars to the weather, or a social media entry. There's so much more you can do with internet access, you need to be able to access re…

also, AI
Post reply on HN