Modern software is built on a fragile assumption: that the network is always available.
It isn’t.
Trains lose connectivity.
Factories operate behind firewalls.
Hospitals isolate systems.
Devices move, disconnect, and fail.
And yet we keep building applications that stop working the moment the cloud disappears.
This is not a limitation of hardware.
It is a limitation of mindset.
For the last decade, we have treated the cloud as the default execution environment.
Computation, storage, identity, and application logic are centralized, always online, and always remote.
This model breaks under real-world conditions.
Latency is unpredictable.
Costs grow without bounds.
Privacy is compromised by design.
Failure becomes systemic instead of local.
The cloud is a powerful coordination layer.
It is a terrible place to depend on for basic application behavior.
Applications should not stop working when connectivity degrades.
They should not lose data because a service is unavailable.
They should not require a round trip to a distant server to make progress.
An application that cannot function offline is not resilient.
It is incomplete.
Offline is not an edge case.
Offline is the baseline.
Edge-first does not mean rejecting the cloud.
It means redefining its role.
The edge is where data is created.
The edge is where decisions must be made.
The edge is where users interact with software.
The cloud exists to coordinate, not to control.
Synchronization should be explicit.
Conflicts should be deterministic.
Failure should be local, not global.
Modern platforms encourage dependency.
Proprietary APIs.
Opaque execution.
Irreversible coupling.
This leads to lock-in, not reliability.
Applications should be portable.
State should be inspectable.
Logic should be reproducible.
A system you cannot debug locally is not under your control.
SQLite is everywhere.
It is embedded, deterministic, battle-tested, and reliable.
It does not require a server.
It does not assume connectivity.
It does not hide complexity behind a network boundary.
SQLite already powers the edge, silently.
We believe it should power the application runtime itself.
Storage, computation, synchronization, security, and AI should not be separate services.
They should be capabilities of a single, local runtime.
Logic runs where the data lives.
State evolves deterministically.
Synchronization happens when possible, not when required.
This is not a return to the past.
It is a correction.
Automatic systems that cannot be reasoned about eventually fail.
We choose explicitness over convenience.
Synchronization must be observable.
Conflicts must be explainable.
Behavior must be replayable.
If you cannot reproduce it, you cannot trust it.
Inference should not require a network round-trip.
Embeddings should not leak private data.
Learning should respect locality.
The edge is not too weak for AI.
The cloud is too far.
Software should continue to function without connectivity, without subscriptions, and without centralized approval.
The best software does not ask for permission to exist.
We are building an Edge Application Platform based on SQLite.
One that runs locally, synchronizes explicitly, executes logic on-device, integrates AI where data lives, and remains portable and open.
The cloud is optional.
The edge is mandatory.
I am the founder of SQLite AI, we’re building an edge-first application platform based on SQLite, where apps run locally, work offline by default, and use the cloud only for coordination. Our goal is to treat SQLite as the application runtime, not just a storage layer.
We’ll be sharing more technical details and announcements soon.