Most of the responses to your post are critical, but I couldn't agree with you more. Having a local database would solve all kinds of performance, connectivity

Most of the responses to your post are critical, but I couldn't agree with you more. Having a local database would solve all kinds of performance, connectivity and privacy problems. Transparent background synchronization would be beautiful. Unfortunately, this is a really hard problem to solve. Sync is a bear of a problem in the face of conflicts. An immutable datastore with a log file of all mutations would help a lot, but you'll still have to manage the conflicts. This is not only a back end problem. What kind of user interface do you present that actually makes sense to an untrained user? "Bill changed Mary's name to Marybeth, but Fred changed it to Mary Beth. Which is correct?" Most users will say "Whaaaa? Why are you bothering me?"