[simscitizen]

This comes up constantly and is pretty easily refuted by opening pretty much any app on an Android or iOS phone and observing just how many pages of the system shared libraries are touched by even the most trivial apps. You can do this by e.g. purging the FS cache, disabling readahead, launching an app, and then observing how many code pages are resident.

All of that code would have to be brought into app binary itself, making mobile apps even larger in code size than they already are. Dead code elimination could eliminate some of that bloat, but I doubt it'd eliminate much of it, given that we're only measuring resident pages to begin with.

Only allowing static linking might make sense on servers (it certainly makes deployment a lot easier). But it wouldn't work on mobile devices without significantly changing the way mobile apps and OSes are architected.

[pjmlp]

Including XPC, D-BUS and COM into the picture, which allow for dynamic linking, or if one wants static linking like experience with out-of-process servers, and still there are some issues with it.