This goes to the article's point about caching; a chat app -- of all programs -- should cache conversations for a fast boot up. Sure, _updating_ the conversations -- the "cloning" stage -- may take some time, but why should you have to wait for the network requests to complete before seeing your past conversations?

The git equivalent would be if you had to wait for git to do a fetch/pull every time you ran "ls" on a git-controlled folder. It would be insane, and no one would use git (or any other version control).