Because you can't expect non-techies to manage their own crap beyond an app and do their own devops managing their own servers. And most techies do not want to

Because you can't expect non-techies to manage their own crap beyond an app and do their own devops managing their own servers. And most techies do not want to manage yet another server anyway. The furthest you could go is something like an app that reads data on the free icloud / google drive allotment they have. Then you'll have to deal with instances of losing their password / changing their broken devices / etc and all the lock out situations that happen. You start to say fuck it and provide your own backend and now you're back at status quo.