Today, every app is written multiple times, usually at least twice for the two major smartphone platforms (sometimes a third or fourth time if they're trying to

Today, every app is written multiple times, usually at least twice for the two major smartphone platforms (sometimes a third or fourth time if they're trying to support Windows Phone, Blackberry, Firefox OS, or some other upstart phone platform) and at least once for the browser. It requires at least 3x the labor that was required during the relatively-brief period when everyone was cool with a browser-based web app replacing a desktop app and expected their mobile web browser to learn to read the internet instead of expecting developers to write a special version for their phone. Additional effort is also being split through the complexity prism of cloud server administration, CDNs, and devops. Everyone believes they need a high-availability cluster for everything these days. We've also moved away from the trend of straightforward RDBMS-backed applications and gone to the experimental realm of key-value stores, document databases, and trying to figure out some XPath-type thing for raw JSON structures. The author's assertion would've been more true about 10 years ago, but I don't think it was ever really true for anyone who wanted something more than a simple blog, which have been readily available off-the-shelf at least since LiveJournal became a thing in the 90s, so no real change there.