I don't think it's really targeted at building apps, as far as I can tell its whole pitch has always been that that most websites are not apps and therefore most websites do not need a full JS framework like Next.js.

They even say it in this blog:

"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"

> Who is this framework for?... It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps.

Not an Astro expert, but the massive headline at the top of the homepage may provide a clue as to their intended audience:

> The web framework for content-driven websites

There are tons of options for sharing state between islands.

The docs show how to use nanostores but you can use other libs like vue refs, etc.

https://docs.astro.build/en/recipes/sharing-state-islands/

On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity.

You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)

I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.

    > They still don't support inter-island communication

If all you are writing a blog and you're not using Substack or Squarespace or any of the other million blog hosting options you're crazy IMO.