I'm also happy to agree that Sandstorm and Cloudron hosts are much less ubiquitous than PHP hosts, and that's a real blocker to ordinary users... but it seems weird to classify them as developer-oriented on that basis?
That's a very fair point. It was unfair of me to lump Sandstorm and Cloudron togther. Sandstorm and Cloudron setup is carried out by the hosting provider. The trouble is that not many Sandstroms hosts exist, as you acknowledge.
Sandstorm's aim is very commendable and thank you for tackling this important problem of deployment and web app installation.