An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.
Steven Vandevelde (@tokono.ma)
Looks like what I've been building is quite similar to what the foundation of Patchwork-26 is. Lots of "tiny apps" (atomization of software, loosely coupled) + just the web. Local-first and where everything revolves around the content (data-first, can use preferred UI/view). Happy to see this! 🎉
Local-First Software: Origins And Evolution
Developer interest in local-first software is continuing to grow rapidly in 2024. At the same time, it’s also apparent that developers currently have different views on what they consider to be ‘local-first software’, ranging from narrower to broader definitions. This prompted us to take a closer look at the origins and evolution of local-first.
Peter Van Hardenberg - Local First: the secret master plan
A New Wave of Peer-to-Peer Apps Heralds a Farm-to-Table Internet
This week, we discuss the local-first computing movement and its push to reduce our reliance on the corporate-owned, cloud-based software tools we use every day.
Designing Offline-First Web Apps
We assume our users are like us—with the latest devices, the most recent software, and the fastest connections. And while we may maintain a veritable zoo of older devices and browsers for testing, …
A Local-First Case Study | jakelazaroff.com
How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.
Native Development
I’ve been on a long-term quest to find a simple, fast, and user-friendly way to develop native applications for a variety of platforms, and this page holds ...
Explore Modern Web Apps & PWAs
The Everything App Store. A cross-platform, open app store that puts users and developers first. Search for a new app or list your app in seconds.
What should follow the web?
Design principles and an instantiation for a post webapp world
Adam Fish - Why Local First matters to businesses
Publishing apps | at-store
Writing, newsletters, blogging, and reader-growth tools built to help creators publish on the open web and keep direct relationships with their audience.
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it
From Volunteer Gardening to Building Next-Gen Distributed Web Apps: My Journey to Holochain App…
A story about discovering community, a mind-warping internet paradigm and a global network of unconventional software engineers.
