Local-first software (2019)

Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest version again. If its good enough as is - and that's the goal - just keep using it forever.

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.

Bro who wants your pointless fitness data? Not even you care that much for that. Just use a notepad ffs.

Fitness data tells a lot, your health status, your daily schedule, with running/cycling/... your exact whereabouts that is quite some valuable information.

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

Tell me more. Lol. I just did a 10k run, I tracked it with my watch but tell me how any of that matters to anyone except me (and it doesn't even matter to me what my HR was over that run - though i did use a HRM but mainly to keep myself from over-exertion). I really don't understand what fitness apps are supposed to do, they're possibly the most useless thing ever invented. I wrote my own app in Clojure over a decade ago and used it to track my workouts for a year or two, I never ever go back and look at a workout more than a week ago, maybe 2 weeks at the most, it simply isn't good data, it is the least valuable data one can generate.

Funny. I keep a gym record in a local note on the phone. Not for the data. For the act of recording it. Never look back.

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