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.

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.

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.

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?!

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.

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.

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