It's a very exciting moment for this movement. A lot of the research and tech for local-first is nearing the point that it's mature, efficient, and packaged into well designed APIs.

Moreover, local-first —at least in theory— enables less infrastructure, which could reignite new indie open source software with less vendor lock-in.

However, despite all my excitement about embracing these ideas in the pursuit of better software, there's one hurdle that preventing more wide spread adoption amongst developers, and that is the Web platform.

The Web platform lacks building blocks for distributing hashed and/or signed software that isn't tied to origins. In other words, it's hard to decouple web-apps from the same-origin model which requires you set up a domain and serve requests dynamically.

Service Workers and PWAs do help a bit in terms of building offline experiences, but if you want users to download once, and upgrade when they want (and internet is available), you can't use the Web. So you end up breaking out of the browser, and start using Web technologies outside of the browser with better OS functionality, like Electron, React Native, Tauri et al (the https://userandagents.com/ community is doing some cool experiments in this space).