[flohofwoe]

That's a fairly dystopian outlook. There's no (technical) reason mobile operating systems can't be just as open as desktop operating systems. The only reason why mobile platforms are locked down are business interests (we're lucky that IBM lost its iron grip over the PC platform early on, otherwise we'd still be stuck in the computing dark ages).

(apart from that: a filesystem is nothing else than a database, and text files are pretty much the most open data format imaginable, it's not like we arrived there by accident).

[osmarks]

A filesystem is a hierarchical key-value database, which is not what many applications actually want, and plain text is not a data format for anything except structureless human-readable-only, well, plain text. While you could then put some textual format like JSON or ad-hoc space separated values or something into a text file, the tooling around text files may not deal with this very well. And it's slower than something like SQLite and lacks the aforementioned convenient syncing capabilities.