>building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online"
Wow. That is so incredibly wrong. People have been building local-first software twice as long as the internet has even been publicly accessible at all.
The tools to build local native apps, the UI for them, and the libraries that they can use, are all still decades ahead of the web-first tools.
I say this as someone who has spent the last 15 years building web apps. We haven't even reached parity with 1995-era desktop apps yet. We're only barely beginning to approach that level of usability and functionality now. And with radically more complexity to do so. (And worse performance.)
Building native desktop software without having any dependence on being online all the time and dependence on having high bandwidth and dependence on a good signal is worlds simpler than developing software that depends on all that extra stuff. All that stuff that is out of your control.
It is more complicated. If you can accept an always online / always connected model then you can guarantee more things because there is only one source of truth (the server). The reason to care about local first is that even today, it’s hard to guarantee a server will always be connected and that model has some privacy and scalability challenges.
Wow. That is so incredibly wrong. People have been building local-first software twice as long as the internet has even been publicly accessible at all.
The tools to build local native apps, the UI for them, and the libraries that they can use, are all still decades ahead of the web-first tools.
I say this as someone who has spent the last 15 years building web apps. We haven't even reached parity with 1995-era desktop apps yet. We're only barely beginning to approach that level of usability and functionality now. And with radically more complexity to do so. (And worse performance.)
Building native desktop software without having any dependence on being online all the time and dependence on having high bandwidth and dependence on a good signal is worlds simpler than developing software that depends on all that extra stuff. All that stuff that is out of your control.