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Comment by sagolikasoppor | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe with this is how do you charge users? They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.

Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline. I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still. Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?

I really like offline first web apps, but it is way harder and more expensive to build I think. For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app and where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere so it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face.

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That's literally how all software development used to work. All of these, except merge conflicts, are solved by expiring licenses, collecting logs and uploading them when asked or when connectivity comes back and it doesn't matter if it doesn't, it's the user's choice.

Merge conflicts are truly the only unsolved issue and for good reasons. Notably offline IDEs work together with on-demand-online version control software to solve this problem, and also have been since forever. Hard part is getting non-text data to merge; you usually implement file-level checkout/checkin logic (see perforce, sharepoint, etc.)

Well, Yes. But users today are used to everything being saved remotely, especially on a website. I think customers would be very angry if suddenly their data were gone because a sync didn't go through and data were lost because they cleaned their cache on perhaps another site that then affected all sites.

People do have higher expectations on software than they used to have. There are also other issues with syncable states than the OP wrote about. Just imagine that you upgrade your api, you will have to be very backwards compatible for a long time or force users to update their web apps when they come online again.

It's easy to mess up service workers and it's possible to put stuff in a state which is almost unable to recover from unless the users affected clear their cache and then risk losing all of their data. Stuff like that can't happen with a normal web app.

While all of these things are certainly possible, I also do think that the development time is longer. You will have a hard time to compete with businesses that don't care about local first stuff since they can pump out features in a higher rate than you can because you have to care about states in a much deeper sense.

It makes sense for some apps to be local first, but not really for that many imho.

> But users today are used to everything being saved remotely, especially on a website.

That's just a matter of training. They were trained that way. 30 years ago users were trained to "save often".

Absolutely, but then you have to be the guy training users when everyone else is training them differently.

> While all of these things are certainly possible, I also do think that the development time is longer.

I agree, but I don't think dev time is longer due to some intrinsic reality that local-first is technically harder. Nearly 2 decades of work has been put towards tailoring building blocks for SaaS systems. Similar building blocks can be made for local-first.

"My main gripe with this is how do you charge users?

Sometimes, I feel so old. Recently, I read about a junior dev who did not understand that you can build websites that aren't SPAs and was confused when Chrome's debugger cleared itself on a page reload.

People have been charging users for offline apps since before "offline" was a concept that needed to exist because back then, everything* was offline.

* with exceptions.

> My main gripe with this is how do you charge users? They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.

Let users pay a price to download the application, do some magic key activation (that could work offline too) like countless of professional software? Ableton, Spine2D and Cascadeur are some recent software I've purchased that works just like that.

> Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others.

Yeah, I think if you have an existing application/architecture/design and you try to shoehorn in local-first with sync in there, there will be some additional work. But if you design your data structures with that in mind, it gets a lot easier. So as always, way easier for greenfield projects than migrating existing ones.

> How do you solve merge conflicts?

Depends on your application. In many cases, CRDTs (just one example) can automatically resolve things based on however you set it up. And for when that doesn't work and you need manual solving, that gets easier too as you can easily see exactly where it doesn't merge, and it gets a lot easier to build the tooling you'd expose to the user to resolve it.

> They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.

You are so optimistic about browser's garbage collector! What you have said is possible, but I need a whole computer devoted to use some web-browser software in such a way. Any another web-page can make the "system" to crash and bye-bye foreverness.

It was better 10 years ago when I could buy a 1-day trial to some expensive newspaper, then open all the long-reads and read everything effectively free. Now any web-page tries to be very much smarter than the user and I would rather never use any proprietary "app" for not even seeing what the vendor has prepared to such a digital scavenger.

People have figured that out for desktop applications years ago.

> My main gripe with this is how do you charge users? They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.

Charge users to buy the product. Don't charge users to use the product. I know it's a revolutionary way to think.

> Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline.

Yes, so?

> I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still.

Have you asked the user if they want those errors, which often contain private information, to be sent?

> Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?

There's tens, if not hundreds, of solutions to sync. Why don't you take a look at one of the existing solutions?

> I really like offline first web apps

Really? It sounded like you wanted to charge users and didn't like the idea of users going offline. Kind've hypocritical to then say you like offline-first.

> more expensive to build I think.

Not at all. You should be building and deploying in containers. Containers can and should be 100% local first. You download the dependencies (`FROM` statements) and then disconnect from wifi. If you can't build after that then you're doing it wrong.

> For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app

Not if you're doing it right.

> where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere

I'm happy for you! Unfortunately you seem to be the type of person who wants to reduce cost. That means remote workers. Remote workers often live where their internet is very sub-par and/or metered. Local-first (and especially offline-first) will help reduce cost even more.

> it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face

I assume you're in the USA. You shouldn't take the FCC's connectivity reports at face value especially after certain people have gutted the FCC's ability to provide reliable connectivity data. You also shouldn't assume that every customer around you has access to fast internet because, unfortunately, last-mile internet service providers have a tendency of monopolistically abusing their customers.

If you're not in the USA... well I'd still be willing to bet that you're wrong unless your customers are exclusively in an urban environment.

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