News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular?. Parent comment

Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by nenenejej on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:12PM (#45338849)
Or split into 2 things:

Most people have a Dropbox, Apple Storage, Google Storage or similar.

A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

It is sort of a combo of those 2 things economically.

Dropbox could sweep up here by being the provider of choice for offline apps. Defining the open protocol and supporting it. adding notifications and some compute.

You then use Dropbox free for 1, 5, 10 offline apps (some may need free some paid) and soon you'll need to upgrade Storage like any iPhone user!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by ghaff on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:30PM (#45339032)
>A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

More or less no one used to "happily" pay. Absent pirating software, they did pay often hundreds of dollars for all sort of software sight unseen (though shareware did provide try before you bought) which often came with minimal updates/upgrades unless they paid for such.

But expectations have largely changed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by nenenejej on Monday September 22, 2025 @04:33PM (#45339079)
Happy as you can be when paying for something!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by chaostheory on Monday September 22, 2025 @06:26PM (#45340385)
Given the anemic sales of macOS apps vs online subscriptions, I would disagree. I’m sure it’s the same story on windows. Offline only makes sense when your public infrastructure is garbage. Otherwise most people will choose convenience over control.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by scarface_74 on Monday September 22, 2025 @06:41PM (#45340507)
Adobe and Microsoft might disagree…
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by chaostheory on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @10:04AM (#45347214)
MS favors Office 365 online.

Adobe is keen to emphasize that their products are cloud based

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by data-ottawa on Monday September 22, 2025 @07:38PM (#45340994)
iCloud kind of does this and is the suggested way to store app data files.

It’s not immune to file conflicts across your devices though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by account42 on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @05:25AM (#45344702)
Making people dependent on a cloud subscription isn't exactly in the spirit of spreading offline programs...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? by nenenejej on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @06:12PM (#45353442)
Dependent isn't the intent here. Obviously big corps are incentivised to do that so there is that danger. But ideally it is all based on open standards.
[ Parent | on HN ]