Local-first software (2019)

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.

Yes, you are. You can find tons of purely local apps that monetize themselves with ads.

How do they do that without hitting the internet?

>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.

but yeah, you're right to be concerned, i'm seeing bots everywhere too.

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.

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.

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.

If that's true, it's a substantial upset to the old paradigms of data and computing.

Perhaps you will not take umbrage when I point out that you use full stops (periods) but not bother with twitching a finger towards your shift key. I will guess you are using a phone/tablet and have to switch keyboard layouts to get something as exotic as a capital letter on the screen.

Up your arse.

Will that be all master?

Should I emulate your mistakes or someone else's mistakes?

A person will misspell a word or put in some sort of rubbish. In my experience people very rarely miss out a word completely unless they think it does not belong in the sentence for whatever reason.

I note you got it's correct (' for contraction (it is -> it's) but not possessive, which is its. Normally, possession is indicated with 's)

You also smashed it with a suitable choice of capital letters and finished with an exclamatory flourish!

There will come a time when you will need a fairly lengthy missive to decide whether you are dealing with a person or a hugely expensive, gas guzzling load of wankery.

Today is not that time.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-accidentally

I still purport that in the future, most applications and screen time will fall into a generative AI bucket: creating media, writing code, watching videos, playing games, searching for information, etc. I wouldn't even be surprised if our personal images and videos get somehow subsumed and "enriched" with AI.

[1] Well, email might fall into a non-generative bucket. There are already tools that purport to both read and write your emails for you. I'm not quite sure what to make of those.

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.)

Good thing I'm not talking about data consumption apps then, as I mentioned in my comment above. Local-first apps specifically are not amenable to data consumption purposes so while you are right on the generative AI part, it's unrelated to the topic of this post.

[1] https://thymer.com/local-first-ejectable

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.

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)...

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.

A notepad also isn't enough to correlate heart rate etc to specific exercises and plotting over time

Only useful thing from Garmin app has been comparing heart rates to a year ago.

And as for sqlite being local first - it's not the same. It's the nature of the data a plain text note taking app deals with that neuters that very idea of those plain text notes by storing in a local sqlite db.

Pen and paper is severely underrated today.

    sqlite3 data.db 'select text from notes'

Asking for a friend . . .

They're still a local-first note application. It's just slightly harder for you to edit your notes externally, and not even by that much - it's very easy to directly query (read and write) SQLite databases, and if you really cared you could have made a script to grab a note, export it to a temporary text file, allow you to edit it, then update the SQLite database.

> I can't version controlled backup and sync those files

You absolutely can - you can dump SQLite databases to text files that contain SQL queries that will restore the database that you can then backup and sync: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75675/how-to-dump-the-da...

> then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues

Yes, that's because "plain text" files are bad for performance and harder to sync correctly. For people who (1) have over a hundred thousand notes they want to keep (like me) and (2) want maximum confidence that they're not going to lose years worth of work, that's incredibly important.

The devs made the right choice. You can always write scripts to interface with a SQLite database with an external editor. You can't take plain text files and magically make them as fast and durable as a database.

It's possible most ubiquitous open source software ever (far more common than markdown) and your notes exist in fully readable text form inside it

Bear being proprietary is the real threat of lock in

> It's just slightly harder for you to edit your notes externally

Yup, just slightly harder! Very slightly. A difference of 3.75 picoseconds. Couldn't agree more.

> it's very easy to directly query

Right!

> and if you really cared..have made a script

And designed a nuclear reactor while I was at it, isn't it?

> The devs made the right choice

Yessss!! Finally.

Ffs!!!

This is just unbelievable! Fucking pitchforks are out literally!

I am dealing with plain text notes and you all want me to write sql queries and scripts to access those fucking text files?

Are you all (these few people who just jumped in the subthread) pulling some sort of prank of so?

Also interesting to note that you couldn't actually muster a coherent response to any of my points and just had to make ad hominem attacks and emotional outbursts.

Claude can one shot this.

Bear devs advise against doing that: "Generally speaking, it is safe to access the database for reading only"

https://bear.app/faq/where-are-bears-notes-located/

It's still worth pointing out that this design decision is orthogonal to the decision to use SQLite, though. The Bear devs could have designed it such that you could write to the database directly, or they could have kept the text-file-based design, but still told the user that they can't modify the files directly (as one of my personal projects does). The assignment of blame to SQLite specifically is misguided.

I don't want you to do anything. Use whatever you want! But if you love your tool except for the fact it uses an open database format instead of text files, then lucky you, there's a solution, and it takes all of five minutes.

How would you design a system that uses SQLite as primary storage for notes (rather than just as a search index or metadata store) while still letting people edit those notes in any text editor, sync via any cloud and make them accessible to any AI or other third party software that knows how to use a file system?

Exporting and re-importing every single time you want to edit a note is impractical for tech folks and impossible for regular users.

I can imagine a partial solution using FUSE, FileProvider and whatever the respective file system abstractions are on other platforms. But that would be a huge amount of work.