The folks at Braid (braid.org) and Ink & Switch (inkandswitch.org) think part of the answer (at least for team collaboration applications) is to use CRDTs to mi

The folks at Braid (braid.org) and Ink & Switch (inkandswitch.org) think part of the answer (at least for team collaboration applications) is to use CRDTs to mirror frontend state between devices collaborating on a dataset, making the backend mostly just one more device, maybe using encryption to keep users' data private from the backend. For something like a kanban board or a collaborative document editing app I think this could work really well, though I'm not sure how it generalizes. People from those communities say it's a relief building this way, though they're building simple proofs of concept still and it's not clear to me how well the approach holds up in fully fleshed out products. But it does seem to make a lot of sense in situations where a lot of the work involves keeping a bunch of devices in sync with each other.