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> Like if I think about the apps I use, my friends use etc, most of them are local.

Ones that you have to pay for directly?

Aside from game devs it's hard for me to think of who the major players are in that space any more. And now even when the game has a single-player mode it seems to demand an Internet connection, whether for DRM reasons, "anti-cheat" (why do you care?), updates etc.

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They aren't major players, but there are still plenty of apps that are more "app with options to save to cloud" than "thin client with maybe some caching options". A quick skim on my phone shows it mostly pertains to apps that connect to other hardware (my router/modem and smart bulb, for instance), utility apps (file exploreres, calculators, and task lists), and local media apps.

But one enables continual revenues streams and the other succumbed to extremely rampant piracy in the app space. As such, even many games on mobile are service games rather than a local single player game.

Even the apps I pay (or paid) for directly are local first. Eg the Adobe suite, Unity Pro, Affinity. Some, like Copilot, do require internet but there is no feasible way to get offline access for an online service.

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