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Local-first software (2019)

(www.inkandswitch.com)
863 points gasull | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.415s | source
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mazzystar ◴[] No.44477410[source]
This reminds me of my own painful story: I once made a local photo search app called Queryable that ported OpenAI's CLIP model to iPhone, letting you search your photos with queries like "a black cat sitting on a sofa."

Since it needed to access users' local photo libraries, I didn't want the app to connect to the internet under any circumstances. So I made it a paid app instead of the usual free+in-app purchases model, since the latter requires calling StoreKit which goes online. But because the app had to run the CLIP model, it would crash on lower-performance phones like the iPhone X. Users who paid for it couldn't use it and felt scammed, leading to tons of one-star reviews and angry complaints about their photos being stolen. Eventually I decided to open-source the app, though it never brought me much revenue anyway.

Two years later, Apple started announcing they'd be integrating this exact feature into Apple Intelligence : )

replies(1): >>44477647 #
1. replwoacause ◴[] No.44477647[source]
Couldn’t you have just restricted the app to being installable on only certain iPhone models?
replies(1): >>44479367 #
2. mazzystar ◴[] No.44479367[source]
Apple doesn't allow developers to target specific device models, presumably to prevent discrimination. However, you have two options: 1. Set a minimum iOS version requirement, or 2. Restrict to devices with A12 chips or later. But neither approach can exclude certain problematic device models.