LiveSync: Your App, Everywhere

The Problem

The internet is not as reliable as we pretend it is — and our applications aren’t built for that reality.

3.8 billion mobile users experience unreliable connectivity every day:

• Spotty Wi‑Fi
• Subways and tunnels
• Airplane mode
• Rural and developing regions
• Crowded events where networks collapse under load

Yet most web and mobile apps are built on a single, fragile assumption: the user is always online. When that’s not true, everything breaks:

• Data disappears
  Type a long message, lose signal, and it’s gone.
  Fill out a form, lose connection mid-submit, and start over.
  Edit a document offline, and your changes live only in a tab that might crash.

• UI breaks
  Spinners that spin forever.
  Useless “Something went wrong” errors.
  Buttons that silently fail because the request never completed.

• Sync conflicts destroy data
  Two users edit the same record offline. When they reconnect, “last write wins” overwrites someone’s work. Data loss is treated as acceptable.

Building apps that work offline is possible — but incredibly hard:

• CRDTs are hard — Conflict-free Replicated Data Types are the gold standard for automatic conflict resolution, but implementing them correctly requires deep distributed systems expertise.
• Sync engines are complex — You must handle network partitions, event ordering, reconciliation, schema migrations across offline devices, and consistency guarantees — without blocking the UI.
• Existing tools fall short — They’re either too low-level (research libraries), too opinionated (full framework replacements), or too expensive (enterprise-only, $50K+/year).

The result? 99% of applications pretend offline doesn’t exist. Users pay the price with lost data, broken experiences, and constant frustration.

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Our Solution: LiveSync

LiveSync is a drop-in sync engine that makes any application work offline — automatically.

Wrap your existing data store with LiveSync, and your app becomes:

• Offline-capable by default
• Real-time when online
• Conflict-safe via CRDTs

All without changing your application logic.

import { createSync } from "livesync";

const sync = createSync({
  local: sqliteAdapter(db),
  remote: apiAdapter("https://api.myapp.com/sync"),
  schema: mySchema,
});

// Use sync.store exactly like your regular store
// Reads and writes work offline automatically
await sync.store.tasks.create({ title: "Buy groceries", done: false });
const tasks = await sync.store.tasks.findMany({ where: { done: false } });

If your app can talk to a database, it can talk to LiveSync.

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How It Works

1. Drop-In Integration

LiveSync wraps your existing data layer. Whether you use:

• SQLite
• IndexedDB
• Postgres
• A custom store

…LiveSync provides a thin adapter that intercepts reads and writes. Your app continues to use the same API shape — but now it’s local-first and sync-aware.

2. Automatic Offline Support

When the device goes offline:

• All writes are queued locally
• Reads are served from the local store
• The UI stays fully responsive

No special offline code paths. No “retry” buttons. No mandatory “You’re offline” banners — unless you want them.

3. CRDT-Based Conflict Resolution

When the device reconnects, LiveSync syncs queued changes with the server using CRDTs:

• Text fields — CRDT text sequences (similar to Google Docs) provide character-level merges with no overwrites.
• Counters and numbers — Commutative counters ensure increments from multiple devices add up correctly.
• Sets and lists — Add-wins or remove-wins semantics (configurable) prevent duplicates and define clear conflict behavior.
• Custom merge strategies — For domain-specific logic (e.g., financial ledgers, medical records), you can plug in your own merge functions.

Conflicts are resolved automatically and deterministically. In practice, 99.97% of conflicts never require user intervention.

4. Real-Time Sync When Online

LiveSync isn’t just about offline → online transitions. When devices are connected, LiveSync provides real-time sync:

• Changes propagate across all connected devices in milliseconds
• Collaborative editing, live dashboards, and multiplayer UIs become trivial

Think Figma/Google Docs-style collaboration, but for any data model and any stack.

5. Schema-Aware Sync

LiveSync understands your data schema and manages:

• Schema evolution across app versions
• Migrations for devices that have been offline for days or weeks
• Safe upgrades before syncing to the latest server state

When a device comes back after weeks offline, LiveSync migrates its local data to the current schema first, then syncs — preventing corruption and data loss.

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Key Technical Features

• Selective Sync
  Control what syncs where. Define which collections and records sync to which devices:

  • Mobile app: only the current user’s data
  • Admin dashboard: full dataset
  • Edge devices: only relevant subsets

• Compression & Batching
  Sync payloads are compressed and batched. A device offline for a week doesn’t download the entire database — only the delta.

• Encryption at Rest
  Local data is encrypted on the device. Lost phone? Your users’ data stays protected.

• Optimistic UI by Default
  Writes are applied locally first, then synced in the background. Users never wait for a round-trip. If the server rejects a write (permissions, validation), LiveSync surfaces a clear callback so you can:

  • Roll back
  • Show a targeted error
  • Prompt the user to resolve the issue

• Observable Queries
  Subscribe to queries and get real-time updates as data changes locally or via sync. Perfect for reactive UIs:

  • Live lists
  • Dashboards
  • Collaborative views

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Framework Integrations

LiveSync ships with first-class integrations for modern stacks:

• React — useSyncQuery() hook for reactive, offline-capable data
• React Native — mobile-optimized with background sync and battery-aware scheduling
• Vue — composables for sync-aware, reactive queries
• Svelte — native store integration
• Vanilla JS — framework-agnostic core API for any environment

You keep your existing framework and patterns. LiveSync just makes them local-first.

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Why Local-First Matters Now

Local-first isn’t a niche preference — it’s a fundamental shift in how software should work.

1. Speed
   Local reads are instant. No network round-trip means sub-millisecond response times. Users feel the difference immediately.

2. Reliability
   Your app works everywhere:

   • Airplanes
   • Subways
   • Rural areas
   • Developing nations
   • Stadiums and conferences

   No connectivity = no problem.

3. Privacy
   Data lives on the user’s device first. You control what gets synced and when. Users retain ownership and visibility into their data.

4. Resilience

   • Server down? App still works.
   • Database migration fails? Local data is safe.
   • DDoS attack? Users remain productive.

5. Cost
   Fewer server requests mean lower infrastructure costs. Most reads never hit your server at all.

Local-first is becoming the default expectation for modern, high-quality applications.

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Traction

LiveSync is already powering production apps at scale:

• 800+ applications in production across mobile, web, and desktop
• 12M+ sync events per day across our customer base
• 99.97% conflict resolution success rate — conflicts resolved automatically without user intervention
• Adopted by major apps in:
  • Field service — offline work orders and inspections
  • Healthcare — patient data in low-connectivity clinics
  • Logistics — delivery tracking on the road
  • Fintech — offline-capable POS terminals
• $650K ARR, growing 30% month-over-month
• Open-source core with 5,200+ GitHub stars

We’re past the prototype stage: LiveSync is battle-tested in production.

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Business Model

We combine an open-source core with a simple, transparent SaaS model.

• Open-Source Core (Free)

  • CRDT engine
  • Local storage adapters
  • Offline support
  • Framework integrations

  Free forever, permissive license.

• LiveSync Cloud — $29/app/month
  Managed sync infrastructure:

  • Hosted sync server
  • Production-grade conflict resolution
  • Sync analytics dashboard
  • Automatic scaling
  • 99.9% uptime SLA

• Enterprise — $199/app/month
  For teams with stricter requirements:

  • Self-hosted sync server
  • Custom CRDT strategies
  • End-to-end encryption
  • Compliance: HIPAA, SOC 2
  • Multi-region deployment
  • Dedicated support and onboarding

Pricing is simple, predictable, and accessible to startups and enterprises alike.

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Market Opportunity

The local-first and offline-first category is emerging rapidly, driven by:

• 3.8B mobile users with unreliable connectivity
• IoT and edge computing — devices that must operate independently
• Regulatory pressure — data sovereignty and residency laws
• User expectations — instant, responsive experiences everywhere

The sync infrastructure market is estimated at $2.5B, with the local-first segment projected to grow at 35% CAGR as more teams realize they can’t keep faking “always online.”

Competitive Landscape

• Firebase — Limited offline support, tightly coupled to Google’s stack, and strong vendor lock-in.
• Realm — Great for mobile, but tied to MongoDB and not designed as a general-purpose sync layer for any backend.
• Research CRDT libraries — Academically solid, but low-level, hard to integrate, and not production-ready for most teams.

LiveSync is the only solution that offers:

• Production-grade, drop-in sync
• Works with any data store, any framework, any backend
• Open-source core plus a simple, affordable cloud

We’re building the sync layer of the modern stack, the way Stripe became the payments layer and Auth0 became the auth layer.

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The Team

• CEO — Former Figma engineer who worked on the real-time multiplayer engine that powers millions of concurrent editors. Deep experience building low-latency, real-time collaboration at global scale.

• CTO — Distributed systems PhD from INRIA, the research lab that invented CRDTs. Published 8 papers on conflict-free replication and co-authored the CRDT specification used by industry.

• Head of Engineering — Former Notion offline engineer who led Notion’s local-first architecture for mobile. Knows the real-world challenges of shipping offline-capable products to millions of users.

This is the team that has already built the kind of systems LiveSync is productizing.

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Vision

We believe the next generation of software will be local-first by default:

• Every app will work offline
• Sync will be invisible and reliable
• Conflicts will be resolved automatically, not by users

LiveSync is building the infrastructure layer that makes this future trivial for every developer — not just distributed systems experts.

LiveSync: Your app, everywhere. Online, offline, and everything in between.