The existence of user-visible files is orthogonal to local vs network. Dropbox gives you a network-accessible filesystem, and iOS stores data locally with no vi

The existence of user-visible files is orthogonal to local vs network. Dropbox gives you a network-accessible filesystem, and iOS stores data locally with no visible filesystem. As long as you have the ability to move your data around, eg 'export photos from flickr to facebook', adding some file system only complicates matters. I'm not convinced that having to learn how a dozen different websites import and export data is an improvement over having a file that I can do whatever I want with. That seems like a step back to the 90s where every app had a unique format and your options for manipulating and moving data around were limited to what each app explicitly supported.