I think developers overestimate how much everyday users care about local-first, or working offline.

At home and in the office, we have the Internet, so it's only on the move in places where you phone doesn't work where this matters and most of us probably don't work in those places enough for it to matter.

I worked on an app a while back, a synchronising drawing app, and ran into the issues mentioned in the article that synchronising is hard and is solving a problem very few people actually have, the need to work offline.

I'm a sort of "desktop app believer" in that I think you tend to get a better UX from native desktop apps than the web, but convincing enough people to believe you or give you money for it is another matter.

> I think developers overestimate how much everyday users care about local-first, or working offline.

And that's because (many) everyday users are not even aware that being online is not essential to perform the functionality they need from their applications. It's not that users don't care that they cannot work offline. It's that they don't even understand that requiring an internet connection is not a technical necessity, but rather an artificial limitation imposed by business interests or incompetence.