If you use an Android phone, or an iPhone - 99% of your information is already stored in the Cloud. Both Google and Apple backup all of your information for the exact same reasons. But they generally limit the amount of space available for things like photo archives. Apple provides 5 gigs free (you can upgrade) and I’m not sure if Google has a limit.
If you are still on a flip phone, then this shouldn’t convince you otherwise.
The only novel thing this phone is suggesting is that on top of the standard layer of cloud backup (which already exists, perhaps they are hedging their bets on people not realizing that?) is that your apps and photos will be pulled off your local storage and backed up to the cloud, but restored when you need it.
To me this is fundamentally flawed:
-If I really want to recover an old app in real time, it will need to completely download again. This is not much different then just re-downloading from the play store/app store with the exception my data is kept in tact (if the app stores local data). That will chew up a lot of data if being done over 4G in our pay-per gig universe
-For people who create a ton of data (videos/photos) this would be great. But those cloud costs will become prohibitively expensive if left uncapped. Storage and data transfer is not free, and to try and bake years of that cost into a single purchase is a flawed business model that will not last.
I think this will last long enough for them to get enough funding to build their first batch of devices and pay for 12 months of cloud costs before their business eats them from the inside out and they go belly up. It would have been cheaper and smarter to just build a phone that came with a 128gig SD card than it would have to try and push tons of data back and forth to a server.