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What is Local first development

119 points by yonz

by ValtteriL

2 subcomments

Was hoping this to be about development happening on my host OS instead of containers/orchestrators.

by roncesvalles

3 subcomments

Sync is still an unsolved problem. The solutions that claim to do it aren't very satisfactory.

by recursivedoubts

3 subcomments

> Effortless Collaboration: The app supports easy collaboration, even in offline scenarios.
mmm, yes, i see

by mellosouls

0 subcomment

by dariosalvi78

0 subcomment

the problem with this is that most browsers employ persistency rules for OPFS that are not very transparent, at least for the user, or not very predicable, at least for the developer. In other words, a user can find his/her data wiped out all of a sudden.
Here some info: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...
There is also a discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222328
You can use the file system API as an alternative, which is permanent, but it's slow, requires the user to remember where the file was stored, and not recommended for things such as databases.
This makes the whole purpose of it a bit pointless in my opinion. What is your experience with it?

by Black616Angel

4 subcomments

> Picture using these apps offline with automatic synchronization when you’re back online. This is the essence of local-first web development – a revolutionary approach that puts users in control of their digital experience.
I had to laugh very hard at the "revolutionary approach". How is it revolutionary, if software was developed "local-first" for decades?
Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.

by kreco

0 subcomment

Not sure I really understand the "development" part of it even after reading the article.

by sagolikasoppor

6 subcomments

My main gripe with this is how do you charge users? They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.
Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline. I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still. Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?
I really like offline first web apps, but it is way harder and more expensive to build I think. For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app and where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere so it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face.