With the content-based apps, development is often outsourced to an external company. BigContentCo then gives the developers a content feed that's optimized for

With the content-based apps, development is often outsourced to an external company. BigContentCo then gives the developers a content feed that's optimized for web (big PNG images etc). Yes, it would be nice to implement a caching and resizing service for the feed - but there's often not the budget nor time to implement one. And BigContentCo is not willing to pay the developers to host and supply bandwidth - especially when the app is free. TL;DR development does not happen in a vacuum.