> Servers are cheap, and big companies frankly seem to love it when we're dependent on their infrastructure.
I've worked on a few different sync engines for mobile apps over the years, it's also a matter of user expectations in consumer apps. Users expect to seamlessly pick up where they left off on another device and the absence of an intermediary server makes that difficult.
I am. I guess thats something I really like about git + github - you get the best of both worlds. Github is fantastic, and you can use github all day long. But you don't depend on it. If github had an outage like atlassian is having at the moment, there's no downtime. There's no risk of data loss. You can keep working and if you need to you can always move to gitlab or self host.
The downside is you sort of have the worst of both worlds in terms of complexity. You need a working, performant CRDT and a working centralized server. But I think its a great model that we (as an industry) should explore more.
Yeah I agree it's great from that perspective but the business goals very rarely make it a priority given the added complexity. Even supporting offline-first style workflows is step up as you can tolerate more downtime on the backend as your app doesn't become completely useless.
I've worked on a few different sync engines for mobile apps over the years, it's also a matter of user expectations in consumer apps. Users expect to seamlessly pick up where they left off on another device and the absence of an intermediary server makes that difficult.