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> Offline-first apps sound like the future: instant loading, privacy by default, and no more spinning loaders on flaky connections.

The future? I thought all apps were like this before this web2.0 thing ruined it.

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The implied context for that is that whatever information you have in the apps should be kept in sync between devices and between people. Classic desktop applications are more like offline-only. Web 2.0 traded that approach for data living on a server, so it stays in sync because there's only one source of truth, but you can only edit it when online.

'Offline-first' is trying to combine the benefits of both approaches.

What's a little funny to me is that most of Web 2.0 was supposed to solve things like collaborating on a Word doc on a shared server, ideally getting us around the X+1 versions of files problem, but collaboration is a human problem, so now we have X+1 versions, but in the cloud.

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