I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only people in the world who has actually built an app that works in this exact way, and shipped it, and supported it. It was cal

I'm pretty sure I'm one of the only people in the world who has actually built an app that works in this exact way, and shipped it, and supported it. It was called Lighthouse and it was for organizing crowdfunds using Bitcoin smart contracts, so it didn't only have the fun of syncing state via DropBox+friends but also via a P2P network. Here's what I learned by doing that: 1. Firstly - and this is kinda obvious but often left unarticulated - this pattern more or less requires a desktop app. Most developers no longer have any experience of making these. In particular, distribution is harder than on the web. That experience is what eventually inspired me to make Conveyor, my current product, which makes deploying desktop apps waaaaay easier (see my bio for a link) and in particular lets you have web style updates (we call them "aggressive updates"), where the app updates synchronously on launch if possible. 2. Why do you need aggressive updates? Because otherwise you have to support the entire version matrix of every version you ever released interacting with every other version. That's very hard to test and keep working. If you can keep your users roughly up to date, it gets a lot simpler and tech debt grows less fast. There are no update engines except the one in Conveyor that offers synchronous updates, and Lighthouse predated Conveyor, so I had to roll my own update engine. Really a PITA. 3. Users didn't understand/like the file sharing pattern. Users don't like anything non-standard that they aren't used to, but they especially didn't like this particular pattern. Top feature request: please make a server. All that server was doing was acting as a little DropBox like thing specialized for this app, but users much preferred it even in the cryptocurrency/blockchain world where everyone pretends to want decentralized apps. 4. It splits your userbase (one reason they don't like it). If some users use DropBox and others use Google Drive and others use OneDrive, well, now everyone needs to have three different drive accounts and apps installed. 5. Users expect to be able to make state changes that are reflected immediately on other people's screens e.g. when working together on the phone. Drive apps aren't optimized for this and often buffer writes for many minutes. You don't really need this pattern anyway. If you want to make an app that works well then programmer time is your biggest cost, so you need a business model to fund that and at that point you may as well throw in a server too. Lighthouse was funded by a grant so didn't have that issue. Re: business models. You can't actually just sell people software once and let them use it forever anymore, that's a completely dead business model. It worked OK in a world where people bought software on a CD and upgraded their OS at most every five years. In that world you could sell one version with time-limited support for one year, because the support costs would tend to come right at the start when users were getting set up and learning the app. Plus, the expectation was that if you encountered a bug you just had to suck it up and work around it for a couple of years until you bought the app again. In a world where everything is constantly changing and regressing in weird ways, and where people will get upset if something breaks and you tell them to purchase the product again, you cannot charge once for a program and let people keep it forever. They won't just shrug and say, oh OK, I upgraded my OS and now my $500 app is broken, guess I need to spend another $300 to upgrade to the latest version. They will demand you maintain a stream of free backported bugfixes forever, which you cannot afford to do. So you have to give them always the latest versions of things, which means a subscription. Sorry, I know people don't want to hear that, but it's the nature of a world where people know software can be updated instantly and at will. Expectations changed, business models changed to meet them.