Aside from being an advertisement, this does make a reasonably decent point for some use cases... though I don't believe most of them are ones that are commonly solved with web-based CRUD.<p>However, letting people do these things offline on mobile devices introduces non-trivial problems of its own.<p>You've now turned your presumably-consistent, probably-IT-department-managed central database into, at best, a hub that's only eventually consistent. Someone's on vacation and made some updates on their phone? Sure, it looks like it was applied. Better hope they get back in cell range or on a network again for long enough to update -- and that they have a way to monitor it and ensure it was successful -- and at this point you're losing at least part of the convenience this was supposed to enable.<p>You've also now created the necessity for more robust conflict resolution. When you get two people editing the same data in a live web form, you can at least invalidate the second person's update if you're keeping last-updated timestamps. This approach falls on its face in an edit-offline-then-upload model because you now either have to automatically merge changes (yikes), re-create deleted records that were edited (and deal with dead references, yikes), or implement a prompt to get the user to resolve it themselves (unhappy user and yikes).<p>Of course, you also have to decide who should get how much and which of your data synced, make sure it's secure, and supply some mechanism so that a careless user can't drop his phone while not locked and allow someone remote access. Making sure the data is irretrievable without the phone being unlocked and the user signed in to the app is the least of your worries, but still something to worry about. Plus you have the potential for sensitive user data being distributed to places it shouldn't be, e.g. PCI compliance issues...<p>I'm sure there are other issues here, but this is not a replacement; with just these issues it's a totally different paradigm. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but it definitely will not drop in nicely and take all that awful CRUD out of our internets.