Hey, finally got around to reading the article. I have been grappling with the convoluted, fucked up mess that is offline first over the last 6 months. I really truly thought that this was a solved problem which the likes of facebook, instagram, etc have solved a long time ago and that there was some open source version copying whatever underlying mechanism they created.
As for the prior art, I was surprised you didn't mention watermelonDB. It sounds like what you are building but specifically for react native. I tried to use it but there were lots of really annoying api choices regarding how the querying works in the front end and their choices on how their ORM works. But the sync methodology they use seems to be sound, and as they say, they've thought long and hard about. https://watermelondb.dev/docs/Sync/Intro
The project as it is seems pretty low level. Are you planning on adding and ORM layer, or leave that up to someone else?
The last question that I always have is, how would this project create a facebook app clone? IE the user will almost always have subsets of tables that are much much smaller than the full tables the the backend has.
IE, a user should have various posts from the feed, and various users, photos, comments and liked tables downloaded for the next 30 minutes of offline activity lets say. In this system, it seems like we are syncing entire databases. But syncing small slivers of the entire system seems to be what a lot of your typical REST based apps do. Yet it is a problem I haven't been able to solve cleanly or with a unified plan of attack
One reason they are charging is to weed out bad actors or people not serious enough about publishing apps on their stores. That said they could do this as a one off like Google, and make it cheaper too.
This going to be a naive question due to my lack of familiarity with WebAssembly, but what does it it being to the table that wasn’t possible to do with any other standalone program packaged as a binary?
Strong isolation guarantees, mainly, which let hosters (like the OP) resource share more densely and with better startup profiles than virtualisation gives you.
As an iOS developer I’ve learned to never put 3rd party secrets in the app. I typically go with a proxy backend server and attach a request-unique nonce that’s created using an obfuscated secret key stored as an array of integers on the client.
Are Web apps competing with Android apps where users can use Blink-based browsers? I’m not so sure about that… I’d like to see some data points that’d prove otherwise though.
I’m quite confused by the paragraph arguing that advertisers don’t want to violate my privacy. So if I’m a parent and rather keep that private from everyone, how’s showing me diaper ads by obtaining that information from somewhere I didn’t suspect not a violation of my privacy?
I don’t see Apple going the route of bundling Chromium. Catalyst does allow porting iOS apps to macOS but it’s been not great so far.
I think there will always be a category of people who prefer using native apps for performance, security, or access to OS features. Anecdotally I looked at the apps I have installed and I found out that I don’t have many electron apps on my Mac beside chat apps and VS Code. I suspect non tech-savvy people might have even less, since they do a lot more inside their browsers compared to before.
I’m not sure what you refer to when you say “native desktop apps aren’t coming back”, given that they never left t begin with.
WebView is Chromium on Windows now. The holdout is Apple. They are not known to capitulate to industry trends. Maybe this will be the first one they are forced into by popular demand.
