>>IMO the troubling part lies in replication, where I did not find anything with exchangable backends and across desktop, Android and iOS clients.
>>Offline Views as part of the runtime I did not come across.

Agreed- and that is the missing piece. Taking a step back: we developers have no natural interest in mobile OS wars and we (and our customers) are best served by agnostic development tools that allow the customer to choose their OS or hardware on merit rather than because that's what the app runs on. The MS model that supported Windows for years is dead as a dodo. To succeed the tool needs to encapsulate all the generic stuff and allow developers to turn the faucet tap without having to lay their own pipes every time. ;-) IMHO replication/offline views ought to be of the same interest to developers as garbage collection and memory management was for VFP'ers: we know it happens but it has little to do with our day to day labors.