An Experiment: a Completely Agnostic Backend

Consider this scenario: you wake up tomorrow morning with the unshakeable realisation that the world doesn’t have quite enough note-taking apps.

You summon your laptop and immediately get to work crafting your masterpiece: a web app for taking notes that does that one thing that no other note-taking apps do.

2 hours later you’re finished, and you’re rather pleased with the result: it has a list of tasks, uses local storage to persist data and, um, just those two things.

The next morning you wake up with the unshakeable realisation that your web app is web crap if your users can’t punch in a recipe on their PC and see those very same ingredients on their mobile telephone later in the day at the super duper market.

Darn it, this one extra feature — multi-device usage — is going to mean a whole lotta work. You’re going to need a server, a database, user accounts (and social sign-in if you’re not Satan). You’ll have to work out login flows, welcome emails, privacy policies, GDPR compliance — the right to be forgotten, and so on.

It’s quite a lot of effort when all you want is someone to be able to use your ground-breaking note-taking app on two devices.

If only there was some middle ground between single-device use and a full-fat user account…