I just don't get why you'd want any 'apps' on a NAS.
Some of the apps on the thing are in fact useful. The file-browser is great for moving files from say a USB hard drive to the NAS internal drive without hogging a PC doing it over the network. There's a media server app or two...a bit torrent client....wordpress hosting.
It's targeted more toward people who want to do this kind of stuff geeks have been doing for years...but aren't technically inclined. Most of the "cloud" stuff just mostly services that make it easier to access your stuff without having to remember your IP address..or ports..or anything like that. Calling them "personal clouds" is really kind of a misnomer since cloud computing is something entirely different than what this thing is...which is basically a NAS with embedded OS that has internet functions.
All of my remote access to just about everything on my network is done over a VPN I run my main linux machine. That gets me VNC and RDP access as well.
A couple of years ago when I got my first "4G" phone...maintaining several megabits on this pre-LTE connection was no problem...and the provider had pretty good coverage in 99% of the areas I went. So I needed to figure out a way to be able to stream my music over my "4G" connection from home...which has FiOS. One of my previous methods of getting to stuff when I wasn't at home was just SSHing in to my linux machine and manually copying the file to a temporary http directory; but having gobs of bandwidth and realizing even with FiOS on both ends...trying to pull an entire movie to watch would take some time, I set up a very basic PPTP VPN for being able to access my network shares over SMB/Samba. Complicated media servers? Not on my end. Usually I was pulling to a PC anyway...so I'd just mount the "network share" and access it that way. For the most part I could get Android to play files that way; but it became a pretty ugly solution when network conditions tanked. I actually found a couple pieces of software that would solve my problems.
The first piece of software I already had; Asset UPnP. It's a UPnP/DLNA server, but it's audio-only; and it also costs about $25. I bought it back in 2012 when I had a working Onkyo AVR that did network streaming. Sure, it would stream from SMB; but that didn't solve the issue of unsupported formats like Musepack and the handful of SHN and APE files I haven't converted to flac in my collection. I could set it to send formats my device supported "as-is" and convert the rest to something else. You could even pick default output formats and set up client-specific configurations...so say your main device supports everything but your cheap media player just wants LPCM. This actually wasn't even a feature I used till I got in to streaming to the phone.
The second piece of software I found is for my Android device, UPnPlay. Out of all the UPnP/DLNA clients I tried; this is the only one that will work over LTE. While it's set-up to connect directly to a UPnP server on an open port...that's not even what I cared about, because every other UPnP client would refuse to do anything unless it was on WiFi. So while my UPnP server isn't exposed to the internet...the fact UPnPlay would just try a connection anyway and find the "local" server. But the real kicker was that I didn't even have time to figure out how I could possibly set it up to have say "good bandwidth" and "low bandwidth" configurations; it had this handy-dandy option to change/modify your client header. My server has the option for custom configurations based on client ID!
So what I have is a copy of Asset with multiple configurations I can choose from depending on what "name" I put in my client ID. If I'm on WiFi or really good LTE; I can set it to send everything "as-is" except unsupported formats, which we'll just send at LPCM since it's only 1.441mbps. The second option sends unsupported stuff as MP3. Third option sends all lossy as-is but converts all lossless to MP3. The fourth option is about as conservative as I can get; it forces *everything* to 128kbps MP3; even if it's already MP3. The multi-generational loss can be painful...especially given I have a fixed MP3 rate across all configurations...which I set to 128. I haven't really had to use that option in a long time...I don't often see slow 3G coverage anymore that necessitates such extremes. I mean...I suppose it's possible you could push 128 over a 2G line...but whenever I see that data doesn't work anyway.
I also haven't used it much since getting LTE since my carrier is IPv6 and tunnels IPv4 connections; the PPTP tunnel does not survive tower hand-off.