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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

As a user the simple answer is that I'll always use a regular application instead of a "local-first" web app when I have the ability.

"Local-first apps" are the worst of everything - crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source, etc.

At work, I don't have a choice, so it's Google Docs or Office 365 or whatever. And in that context it actually makes sense to have data stored on some server somewhere because it's not really my data but the company's. But at home I'll always choose the strictly offline application and share my data and files some other way.

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> crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source

What does any of this have to do with local first? Most online only apps have this stuff too.

"Local-first apps" are the worst of everything - crappy, dumbed down web UI along with no privacy.

which apps are you talking about here? that description doesn't make any sense to me.

Aren't "local-first apps" in this context the ones where you vist "example.com", and it caches a bunch of HTML and Javascript and saves data locally using the "local storage" APIs? And then periodically makes requests back to "example.com" to check for updates, sync data, etc.?

Kinda yes kinda no? Most PWAs have some idea of offline support but it tends to be an afterthought. The argument of local first is that you design the app to work against a local database ( normally stashed in indexeddb or OPFS ) meaning that you don’t have to wait for data to load or network requests to complete. Your backend is then just a dumb storage engine which accepts changes and sends push messages to the client to indicate things have changed.

The only “big” local first app I’m aware of is Linear.

While I hesitate to agree with that definition of local-first, I agree with your notion thats what the author by large is talking about and unfortunately many such an web-app have the worst of both worlds.

Most uses of the term local-first I see regularly mean to say, "an app that doesnt require 3rd party servers outside of your control to function", within some level of reason. Sometimes agnostic to how it's data is synced, sometimes meaning its an exercise left to the user entirely, sometimes meaning fully self-hosted and hardly local to the device being used to access the app.

Local first isn’t limited to web apps. It’s a style of application development in which you locally store and operate on the data rather than fetching it from a cloud backend every time. For native apps that means a local database or individual files on the file system.

> phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source, etc.

This describes proprietary software developed by capitalist companies. This has nothing to do with local first.

I think most native apps (at least that I use) are local first. I can't think of a single one that requires a consistent internet connection to function, that otherwise could run locally. The whole "local-first" trend that has cropped up lately was at least partially influenced by web apps like Linear and Figma, and if you look at the libraries and writing being produced on this topic it's almost exclusively Javascript and about making crud web apps local-first.

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