I think you missed a critical part of the article, where he quotes the creator of WordPress as saying that PHP will just be used to communicate with the db, wit

I think you missed a critical part of the article, where he quotes the creator of WordPress as saying that PHP will just be used to communicate with the db, with javascript doing the UI work (I'm paraphrasing a little). I think that's what he's getting at. That writing your whole solution in Swift or Obj-C doesn't make sense, because then you need to write a whole new solution in Java for Android. Why not have the common components in Javascript, with the specifics in the platform specific lanaguage?