[dTal]

I have a pet theory that mobile development is deliberately intractable as a kind of gatekeeping tactic. There's certainly no excuse for it to be as inaccessible as it is, with the resources available. There is an aggressive rejection of the mobile phone as a user-oriented computing platform - instead you must be a "developer", and to prove that you are a "developer" you must devote an enormous amount of disk space to "developer tools" and tolerate byzantine project structures and weird languages, which require byzantine IDEs to manage. The provision for writing software actually on these devices with an order of magnitude more power than a Cray-2 is actively suppressed. God forbid I be able to write a friggin Python script on my phone...

This isn't necessarily conscious conspiracy on the part of the perpetrators. But it's a systemic attitude that ultimately has the same effect, and the incentives point in that direction. Remember, Google/Apple only make money on their respective app stores when you buy an app - free apps are worthless to them, as are apps you write yourself; free software apps that let you escape the ecosystem are worse than worthless!