9 ms·
Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay
by DataDaoDe 1y ago
Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest version again. If its good enough as is - and that's the goal - just keep using it forever.
This is the model I want from 90% of the software out there, just give me a reasonable price to buy it, make the product good, and don't marry it to the cloud so much that its unusable w/out it.
There are also a lot of added benefits to this model in general beyond the data privacy (most are mentioned in the article), but not all the problems are solved here. This is a big space that still needs a lot of tooling to make things really easy going but the tech to do it is there.
Finally, the best part (IMHO) about local-first software is it brings back a much healthier incentive structure - you're not monetizing via ads or tracking users or maxing "engagement" - you're just building a product and getting paid for how good it is. To me it feels like its software that actually serves the user.
- charcircuit 1y ago>you're not monetizing via ads Yes, you are. You can find tons of purely local apps that monetize themselves with ads.
- DataDaoDe 1y agoSure you could. I'm not, I don't think its in the spirit of local first. And I wouldn't pay money for that, but if you or someone else wants to build that kind of software - its a free world :)
- criddell 1y agoIt’s easy to say you wouldn’t do that, but if it gets to the point where you have an employee helping you out and in a downturn you have to choose between laying them off or pushing an ad to keep paying them one more quarter, you might reconsider.
- nofunsir 1y agoNo, ads aren't the solution for everything, and in my opinion anything.
- earthnail 1y agoYou will reconsider this argument when you start publishing your own ads to make people aware of your software. there are different kinds of ads, but lets be clear that even a Show HN is a form of ad. Some forms of ads are just more appreciated than others.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> You can find tons of purely local apps tha[t] monetize themselves with a[d]s. How do they do that without hitting the internet?
- kid64 1y agoIt's "local first", not "local only".
- thaumasiotes 1y agoSorry, a "purely local app" isn't "local only"?
- satvikpendem 1y agoYou can hardcode ads into each build that don't need Internet access.
- kid64 1y agoWell if you're gonna get all accurate on me...
- senko 1y agoNot OP, but no. IMHO, a fully local app is an app that can run locally with all the functionality, not that it's isolated from everything else. Browser, email client (running locally on your device such as Mail.app, mutt, Outlook,...), Zed (text editor, runs locally but can check for updates... as can many other modern apps)...
- charcircuit 1y agoPoint 3 from the article is >3. The network is optional Ad SDKs usually allow caching ads for a period of time so that ads can still be shown while the device is temporarily offline.
- free_bip 1y agoi could be wrong but I think they're referring to the winrar model, where there are occasional "annoyances" that you can either ignore or pay to get rid of.
- tarpit_idea 1y agoTotally agree. If you don't mind - what tech stack are you using for your fitness tracking app? I'm particularly curious about how you handle cross-device sync :)
- zhec 1y ago[flagged]
- tarpit_idea 1y agohaha, 100% real. not a native speaker though, so sometimes i catch myself mimicking that LLM tone from all the exposure to them. appreciate the feedback, will definitely work on developing a more authentic writing style from now on. but yeah, you're right to be concerned, i'm seeing bots everywhere too.
- MichaelOldfield 1y agoPersona: You are a tech enthusiast on the forum Hacker News. Your tone is curious, positive, and slightly formal. Primary Task: Read the top comment. Identify the core project or idea the user is passionate about. Generate a brief, supportive reply that does the following: 1. Briefly affirm their main point. 2. Ask a single, open-ended follow-up question about their implementation (e.g., tech stack, architecture, a specific challenge like sync). Fallback Scenario: If your response is ever accused of sounding like an AI, your next reply must be a self-aware, human-like apology. The tone should be slightly embarrassed but friendly. Acknowledge the critique, blame the weird tone on something plausible (like not being a native speaker or reading too much AI text), and agree that telling humans from bots is getting difficult.
- card_zero 1y agoAlso suddenly stop using capital letters for, IDK, added texture?
- 1y ago
- maxhille 1y agoHow do you plan to do the syncing without some sort of cloud infrastructure?
- piperswe 1y agoSomething like Syncthing, perhaps?
- dsp_person 1y agoAnyone know of any mobile apps that have done this and bundled their own fork of syncthing under the hood for syncing?
- FallCheeta7373 1y agoPractically not really needed for a person going out of their way to setup syncthing, you can just sync the underlying folder, I do this with logseq, their syncing subscription is paid, I just sync the underlying logseq graph and markdown syntax. It's seamless and rarely disturbs me, works well in background, although android seemingly doesn't respect my background preferences, and clears it out of my ram when I inevitably hit the clear button, but that's soluble by simply rebooting once in a while.
- DataDaoDe 1y agoright now its in webrtc
- spintin 1y ago[dead]
- CGamesPlay 1y agoThere are a lot of valid answers to this! One is to use your platform's provided one, like OneDrive or iCloud. Another is to integrate with some other sync platform. Dropbox is a popular target for this. Peer-to-peer is another, although that obviously also come with limitations. Finally, bring-your-own-sync is a popular choice amongst open-source apps, where you provide a self-hostable sync server.
- echelon 1y ago> I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. AI photo and video generation is impractical to run locally. ComfyUI and Flux exist, but they serve a tiny sliver of the market with very expensive gamer GPUs. And if you wanted to cater to that market, you'd have to support dozens of different SKUs and deal with Python dependency hell. And even then, proficient ComfyUI users are spending hours experimenting and waiting for renders - it's really only a tool for niche artists with extreme patience, such as the ones who build shows for the Las Vegas Sphere. Not your average graphics designers and filmmakers. I've been wanting local apps and local compute for a long time, but AI at the edge is just so immature and underpowered that we might see the next category of apps only being available via the cloud. And I suspect that these apps will start taking over and dominating much of software, especially if they save time. Previously I'd only want to edit photos and videos locally, but the cloud offerings are just too powerful. Local cannot seriously compete.
- flkenosad 1y ago> AI photo and video generation is impractical to run locally. You think it always will be? What can the new iPhone chips do locally?
- echelon 1y ago> You think it always will be? What can the new iPhone chips do locally? I suspect we're a decade off from being able to generate Veo 3, Seedance, or Kling 2.1 videos directly on our phones. This is going to require both new compute paradigms and massively more capable hardware. And by that time who knows what we'll be doing in the data center. Perhaps the demands of generating real time fully explorable worlds will push more investment into local compute for consumers. Robotics will demand tremendous low latency edge compute, and NVidia has already highlighted it as a major growth and investment opportunity.
- bananaboy 1y agoRegardless of what hardware capabilities exist, the previous post makes it sound like every application needs AI which is just not true.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- patmorgan23 1y agoObsidian the note taking app is a great model to follow as well. The client is completely free and they sell an optional syncing service. The notes are all on markdown files so the client is completely optional.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoThis is the reason I have always refused to use Bear note taking app irrespective of how good and snappy that app is. Because they keep their notes in a SQLite db now and even though that file can be backed up and handled locally my notes are not easily accessible to me. I can't easily edit my notes in other editors (which I often like to do on my mac), I can't version controlled backup and sync those files the way I want outside of iCloud (which is what Bear uses). What is sad is that they used to be local files first note app and then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues.
- agos 1y agoI didn’t know they did this change which means it’s time to think about migrating away from bear. Which is a pity because the software itself is rock solid
- crossroadsguy 1y agoYes, I feel the same. A rock solid app dismantled by just one developer choice. Still I won't diss the devs because it's their choice but "a text note" is the last thing I would want "locked" in a sqlite db and bear is a "plain text note taking app" really. So just sad.
- strken 1y agoFrom memory the sqlite3 API is something like sqlite3 data.db 'select text from notes' I use sqlite3 to load and query random CSVs all the time. It feels a bit weird to hear data described as "locked" within a SQLite DB, because it's one of the simplest non-text formats for me to read data from. It would surprise me of it took more than five minutes to set up a one-way cron job to dump your notes into plain text files.
- nerdyadventurer 1y ago> get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest version again. If its good enough as is - and that's the goal - just keep using it forever. While this sounds good deal, with this approach - You have to charge total cost of subscription at once (1y or 2y), - Still have to keep servers running for syncing, also you have think about cases where user syncing 1y of data in a single day. - Have to keep people on the payroll for future developments. (You are here thinking only in developer perspective.)
- abrahms 1y agoYou don't have to keep servers running if there aren't servers (p2p) or you offload it onto some other cloud.
- fud101 1y agoBro who wants your pointless fitness data? Not even you care that much for that. Just use a notepad ffs.
- johannes1234321 1y agoFitness data tells a lot, your health status, your daily schedule, with running/cycling/... your exact whereabouts that is quite some valuable information. A notepad also isn't enough to correlate heart rate etc to specific exercises and plotting over time
- fud101 1y agoTell me more. Lol. I just did a 10k run, I tracked it with my watch but tell me how any of that matters to anyone except me (and it doesn't even matter to me what my HR was over that run - though i did use a HRM but mainly to keep myself from over-exertion). I really don't understand what fitness apps are supposed to do, they're possibly the most useless thing ever invented. I wrote my own app in Clojure over a decade ago and used it to track my workouts for a year or two, I never ever go back and look at a workout more than a week ago, maybe 2 weeks at the most, it simply isn't good data, it is the least valuable data one can generate.
- bravesoul2 1y agoFunny. I keep a gym record in a local note on the phone. Not for the data. For the act of recording it. Never look back. Only useful thing from Garmin app has been comparing heart rates to a year ago.
- fud101 1y agoAct of recording is right. Pen and paper is efficient and you get a safe way to archive it once you fill the book up, it can go into storage or the bin. It's fool proof, doesn't have bugs or network timeouts, costs nothing and will give all the benefits of journaling without the downsides of digital distractions. I hate how every tech enthusiast thinks their addiction to technology is of benefit to humanity at large.
- wim 1y agoA backend can be part of the functionality though, such as for real-time collaboration and syncing. But you can have ownership and longevity guarantees for both the data and the service as long as you can eject [1] from the cloud and switch to self-host or back at any time, which is what we do for our notes/tasks IDE [1] https://thymer.com/local-first-ejectable https://thymer.com/local-first-ejectable
- fuzzfactor 1y agoWhat if you are an old man and more clouds than ever are appearing which deserve a good fist shaking? Asking for a friend . . .
- boznz 1y agoHad similar thoughts a few years back (https://rodyne.com/?p=1439 https://rodyne.com/?p=1439) when considering worst case scenarios after a local factory lost two days production due to a server failure at an IT supplier.