0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular?
Local-first apps promise instant loading, privacy, and offline functionality, but most apps fail to implement offline support effectively. The main challenge is syncing data across multiple devices, which creates a distributed system with two primary issues: unreliable ordering and conflicts.
In a distributed environment, events occur on different devices at different times, leading to inconsistent results if not handled properly. Traditional databases use strong consistency, but this is too slow and brittle for local-first systems. Instead, eventual consistency is preferred, where devices apply changes independently and eventually converge to the same result.
Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLCs) solve the ordering problem by generating timestamps that are comparable and causally consistent, combining physical and logical time to ensure consistent event ordering across devices. Even with proper ordering, conflicts arise when multiple devices modify the same data. Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) address this by ensuring that changes can be applied in any order without data loss, using strategies like Last-Write-Wins.
Building a local-first app requires a reliable local database, such as SQLite, which is lightweight and widely available. By storing changes as messages with timestamps, the system ensures reliable, deterministic, and cross-platform syncing. Embracing eventual consistency and using techniques like HLCs and CRDTs can result in apps that are instant, offline-capable, and private by default.
For a production-ready solution, the open-source SQLite-Sync extension offers a cross-platform, offline-first engine for SQLite.
https://marcobambini.substack.com/p/why-local-first-apps-havent-become 0 reply
0 recast
2 reactions
