Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!), October 2019, pages 154–178. doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737
This article has also been published in PDF format in the proceedings of the Onward! 2019 conference . Please cite it as:
We share some of our findings from developing local-first software prototypes at Ink & Switch over the course of several years. These experiments test the viability of CRDTs in practice, and explore the user interface challenges for this new data model. Lastly, we suggest some next steps for moving towards local-first software: for researchers, for app developers, and a startup opportunity for entrepreneurs.
We survey existing approaches to data storage and sharing, ranging from email attachments to web apps to Firebase-backed mobile apps, and we examine the trade-offs of each. We look at Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): data structures that are multi-user from the ground up while also being fundamentally local and private. CRDTs have the potential to be a foundational technology for realizing local-first software.
In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.
It’s amazing how easily we can collaborate online nowadays. We use Google Docs to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations; in Figma we work together on user interface designs; we communicate with colleagues using Slack; we track tasks in Trello; and so on. We depend on these and many other online services, e.g. for taking notes, planning projects or events, remembering contacts, and a whole raft of business uses.
We will call these services “cloud apps,” but you could just as well call them “SaaS” or “web-based apps.” What they have in common is that we typically access them through a web browser or through mobile apps, and that they store their data on a server.
Today’s cloud apps offer big benefits compared to earlier generations of software: seamless collaboration, and being able to access data from any device. As we run more and more of our lives and work through these cloud apps, they become more and more critical to us. The more time we invest in using one of these apps, the more valuable the data in it becomes to us.
However, in our research we have spoken to a lot of creative professionals, and in that process we have also learned about the downsides of cloud apps.
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