I agree with you. But that's because the state-of-the-art in clients are cloud hungry applications, giving their parent companies have much to profit from this behavior.

Local-first is a technological sophistication from the current tech status-quo, so it requires more labor to get at a point where it can stand against the current cloud-first applications.

We will only be able to see how far it can go, once the next-gen applications reach the same level.

It will be a harsh competition, but if we can just ship the platform along with it, and at least Android make it possible, users wont even notice, because it was the dev's that made that decision for them. And the dev's will do it because it might make their apps a little better, more responsive and fail proof.

Of course this all must happen before 5G or part of the leverage is gone unfortunately..

But we need at least try anyway, because a world where all the information is centralized on the FAANG titans is a world where freedom, civil and human rights are constantly endangered(especially in the age of AI automation).