alt Hacker NewsSpeaking as someone who has built local-only apps (partially because I don’t want the hassle of maintaining a server):
There are plenty of useful apps that run locally on a phone. You can even run a whole LLM on your phone.
The shiniest and most popular apps are cloud terminals but the iPhone is actually a pretty darn powerful device.
Replies
ulrikrasmussen • today at 8:11 AM
Plenty of useful apps != general purpose computing capabilities.
You are not allowed to run computations that have not been approved by Apple if you are using an iPhone. Yes, the hardware is powerful, but it is cryptographically locked down. It is physically local, but the control of the hardware is entirely non-local and 100% owned by Apple.
➕ show 1 reply
> The shiniest and most popular apps are cloud terminals but the iPhone is actually a pretty darn powerful device.
They are powerful from a computational perspective, but the point was that it's a hassle to run a custom binary on them as compared to regular computers. You get a powerful device that is not flexible in this specific sense, so much of that power is not utilized