It's a service, so there's a substantial maintenance cost to maintaining multiple versions. Curious if you also feel this way about Figma or Notion? Or for that matter, auto-updating software like Chrome or iOS?
I don’t know what Figma or Notion is. But I dropped beloved Tower git client when they went subscription-only. I still sometimes use their last purchasable version though.
Regarding iOS, It’s possible to refuse updates. I also used iPhone 6 for a looong time and went several years without upgrading OS. I also still use old iPad 4 that receives no updates for years. What can I say… it was a good stable ride!
I don’t care about novelty for the sake of novelty. Once I find a tool I like, I’ll use it as long as possible.
And I’m happy to pay through the nose for quality tools. Be it kitchen utensils or gardening tools or electronics.
I do want to see a world where there is a generic syncing service (maybe AWS can run one, but open standards / open source) similar to Dropbox or iCloud. I can pay one lump sum for all my storage and all my apps will connect through it. But so far no such thing exists outside of the crude file-based syncing of Dropbox, and that's not suitable for building realtime apps on top of.
Personally I'm fed up with syncing both as a user and as a developer.
As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.
As a user, I don't want to worry who is going to sell my data after going bankrupt. And I'd prefer small dev shops don't waste their time on keeping network infrastructure up and running with security patches.
I'd love that. Ink & Switch has done extensive research on how to enable this with p2p technology etc. Our industry isn't there yet... but lots of good folks are working on it. The Muse sync setup is a step in that direction.
> As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.
Oh yes. I spent many years carrying a pager for Heroku's infrastructure. Part of the appeal of local-first is the sync infrastructure is necessary to transmit data between devices, not for every single keystroke or gesture the user makes.