The difficulty with cloudless apps is that if you want to sync between devices you still need somewhere to fetch your data from. In theory you can have some tru

The difficulty with cloudless apps is that if you want to sync between devices you still need somewhere to fetch your data from. In theory you can have some true end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer network, but in practice it works much worse than a cloud app with a central server. CRDTs are awesome and offline-first applications are much more responsive than the ajaxified status quo. But CRDTs work much better with a hub-and-spokes model when you know for sure the hub is always online and has sufficient bandwidth. All data can be stored stored locally by the client and the cloud service only serves a distribution channel for end-to-end encrypted data that's a pragmatic middle road where you still have the convenience of the cloud but not the lock-in.