It's funny how this newfangled "local first" thing is what us old fogies used to call just "applications."
I get that there is networking and integration that a modern application will typically need to do (depending on its core purpose), and syncing state to and from servers is a special concern (especially if conflict management is necessary) that native desktop applications rarely had to do in years past.
But at the end of the day, it sure does feel like we've come full circle. For a long time, every single application was "local first" by default. And now we're writing research papers and doing side POCs (I'm speaking generally, nothing to do with the author or their article) trying to figure out how to implement these things.
I feel this way at times too, but the ability to sync state really is key. Traditional native desktop apps rarely had to consider this because users would only ever interact on one device. Now users are moving between a computer and a phone, if not more devices.
If I were to frame it succinctly I would say applications = local-only which is distinct from local-first.
Agreed but even data sync wasn't unheard of before everything became a "web application."
I mean not to get really low level or abstract, but there's a reason that operating systems have the concept of a virtual file system. Where and how your data is persisted is something that can be abstracted from the rest of the system. Add CRDT or another conflict resolution solution to that layer and, I don't want to pretend that it's simple, far from it ... but it's not new tech is all I'm really saying.
Distributed systems were a very hot topic in the 90s. We even went through one very awkward and short-lived fad where we toyed with the idea of having a single application distributed across a network of computers ... not to persist data across multiple systems per se but for computation performance. This entire concept got abandoned when people realized how unnecessarily complicated it was (all cost / very little reward). But it was a thing for a while.
Even RAID distributes data persistence across physical devices and needs to care about data integrity as a result.
It just seems like the longer I'm in the industry, the more I realize that there is very little that is actually new ... despite the fact that we have a large number of enthusiastic young software developers who are looking at these concepts with starry eyes and youthful ignorance because they weren't around decades ago when this stuff was being researched, developed and experimented with.
I get that there is networking and integration that a modern application will typically need to do (depending on its core purpose), and syncing state to and from servers is a special concern (especially if conflict management is necessary) that native desktop applications rarely had to do in years past.
But at the end of the day, it sure does feel like we've come full circle. For a long time, every single application was "local first" by default. And now we're writing research papers and doing side POCs (I'm speaking generally, nothing to do with the author or their article) trying to figure out how to implement these things.