Why the future is local app (getapps.cafe)

This is a nice article and I genuinely agree with its premises. Would be nice to reclaim a privacy back. A bit. But this article would be much stringer if it was not generated by Claude

The future is you pay $1000 for a "cloud terminal" with 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 128 GiB of storage, and all of your apps live, metered, in the cloud. Arbitrary operating systems, and even arbitrary application binaries, are not allowed, in order to comply with laws and regulations, as well as non-legally-binding policies set by credit card companies in response to pressure groups, on what you may compute and what you may communicate. The government can intercept any communications or interactions you have with online services at any time, and any time you touch a computing device it's traceable back to your real name.

It's nice to build decentralized personal software and think you're fighting the good fight, but all the government has to do is pass a law and suddenly that option is, practically and effectively, closed to you. We're headed down that path, and that's before you get to the fact computers powerful enough to support today's more interesting applications are just being priced out of the consumer market altogether.

This article looks a bit superficial to me. The cloud has definitely advantages, like having the same data on all devices and it provides some kind of backup. The mentioned downsides could be adressed by better software archticture or e2e encryption.

Well, when the author eventually gives up trying to sell people names of apps and the domain expires, I’m sure it will present good value when it gets bought and repurposed as a porn site; the first two apps under quick utilities are CreamShot and DripCleaner?!

There is not much choice when even your phone OS isn't a local app.

This really matters in map apps when you're on the road. Apple Maps is all very nice with transit planning but without a solid net connection it lies there mutely. Organic Maps (and others) that use downloaded OSM data work well with nothing more than GPS. You can get a transit plan (trains & trams & buses, and the transfers among them) without up-to-the-minute arrival info.

No, the opposite, the only app which is save is the app you never ship (stays in a cloud). No binary or source code available to search for exploits by ai.

I always wanted to do local and offline first app with optional sync, but the difference in amount of work is just stagering.

Now with LLM to do the boiler plate of event logs, healing, retries and testing all that, it's finally reasonable for a side projet.

And the result is great, the UI is reactive, it works in malls with bad signal, you get a no account experience almost for free...

I do all my apps like that now.

I think some people who grew up with web apps didn't know local native apps preceded them.

I am using the older version of raspberry pi 3 B+ to host mail and web services locally behind firewalls. There is a use case here for developing for remote areas that have unreliable internet and power. Still a way to go but there is something in place. This site is a beta running from my lounge at home. https://localboxmail.co.za/software.html

slightly off-topic but i dont really know how to put it in any other way: everything under this domain feels fake

i am looking very hard for any hint of humanity behind any of it, but all i see is a vibe-coded website, marketing a huge collection of vibe-coded apps by generating articles like this one. even their social media presence (linked on their blog[1]) feels like agents that have been told to role-play on X.com as caricatures of their position/role in the (made up?) company

and i mean.... come on, a $5 web browser??? that's just a wrapper around the system's webview??? why would anyone think this is something worth spending their time building, economically speaking??? even FREE browsers are struggling in this hyper-competitive market. if you make a paid browser it better be the best browser of all time, not some vibe-coded average of every other browser

i agree with the premise, im all for local-first software. but this really feels like the AI-era equivalent of the countless scams we've seen during the crypto-era...

[1]: https://getapps.cafe/blog/a-new-name-behind-the-counter-welc...

Didn't we say a thousand of times that local apps are not "winning" because they can't be monetized (a bit like web games)?

This is true for me, but I wonder if it’s true for most. An alternative framing is not that apps moved to the cloud because they were faster or more convenient but that apps moved to the cloud because they became “free” by you paying with your attention or data. It’s worth reframing the hypothesis to “The future is (paid) local app” and see if you still think it holds.

Yes except the hardware you running these apps on is getting astronomically higher

There was a time when local apps written in binary compiled languages were notably faster to run, but notoriously difficult to write and scale across platforms. Both of these have improved but the JS/CSS run times used for local web apps (V8/Blink and JSCore/Webkit) are now fast enough for well written code to not notice any difference for many use cases. I think soon most SaaS apps without much of a deep tech moat (not easy to replicate) will be labelled as rip-off or anti-patterns.

These are all arguments I made during the "screw it, move it all to the cloud, don't think, just do!" years of the mid 2010s to early 2020s. It's so frustrating to only now see people bringing these legitimate points to light, after everyone has lost so much money yeeting it upstairs and forgetting about it until the bill drained them dry.