[tedmielczarek]

Mobile development still has some unfortunate features, like Apple's App Store guidelines limiting the types of apps you're allowed to distribute there, and ever-changing requirements that mean that apps that don't get updated for newer OS releases (even if the app is otherwise fine) get removed from the app store.

Even with that, mobile is where all the users are nowadays. Traditional desktop/laptop computing is not a growth market. If you want to build software that lots of people will use you want to build it for mobile platforms. Smartphones are also ridiculously overpowered at this point, so you do have the resources to make pretty compelling experiences unlike with what you'd think of as a traditional embedded system.