Building offline-first apps without a backend shifts, not removes, hard problems

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A developer building a fully local app — with SQLite as the sole database and no server, accounts, or sync — shares key lessons from the experience. Without a backend, the device becomes the only source of truth, meaning data errors are permanent and every bug risks data integrity. A critical mistake involved computing period summaries on demand, which caused historical records to silently change whenever underlying figures were corrected; the fix was to freeze and store summaries once a period closed. Backup also requires deliberate design: soft-deleted rows must be retained, device-specific settings like theme should be excluded, and every table must be explicitly listed in the backup routine to prevent silent data loss on restore. The developer concludes that going backend-free eliminates hosting and security overhead but moves all database, schema, and backup responsibilities onto a device the developer does not control.

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