Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

Lotus Notes solved syncing for object databases but the world forgot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

Ahhh Lotus Notes... in many ways ahead of its time, timeless and horribly outdated at the same time.

It’s a least-common denominator effect.

I.e., most people don’t care.

Local-first is optimal for creative and productivity apps. (Conversely, non-local-first are terrible for these.)

But most people are neither creative nor optimally productive (or care to be).

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 was money in it, those problems would be solved at least as well.

Cloud SaaS is both unbreakable DRM (you don't even give the user the code, sometimes not even their data) and an impossible to evade subscription model. That's why it's the dominant model for software delivery, at least 90% of the time. The billing system is the tail that wags the dog.

There are some types of apps that have intrinsic benefits to being in the cloud, but they're the minority. These are apps that require huge data sets, large amounts of burstable compute, or that integrate tightly with real world services to the point that they're really just front-ends for something IRL. Even for these, it would be possible to have only certain parts of them live in the cloud.

I always start with a local first application. And then find that I want to access List X, Design Y, Scribble Z on the road and on my phone. Resulting in a frenzied search for a mobile / desktop alternative that includes syncing. Then finding a solution that requires a subscription and then falling back into fiddling with Google Drive, or something in the Google workspace.

I guess I should bring my devices back to exactly 1 device. Or just take a subscription on one service.