A method and a processing device may be provided for state management of an operating system and applications. A framework may be provided for separating behaviorless state information from code or instructions for executing a method. Applications may have instances of state information derived from, or completely different from, instances of state information of an operating system. Instances of state information for an application may be layered over corresponding instances of state information of the operating system, such that the application and the operating system may have different views of the instances of the state information. At least one policy may be defined, which may include rules for resolving conflicts, information for providing a merged view of data from multiple repositories, default values for instances of data, as well as other information. In various implementations, referential integrity of state information may be guaranteed.