As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been arou

As a mobile dev, I of course jumped into the article, expecting some kind of insight that I had overlooked. Well, there was none. Those arguments have been around for some time and have not proven compelling. Points 1 & 2 were invariants from the start. On the contrary, excellent and fast on device search has enabled me to keep hundreds of apps, as long as I remember their names or keywords. I have always argued that pure information is better served as a single page website, and I have always told my clients so. Point 3 is interesting, but at some point the OS vendors will take steps against that to maintain control. I also cannot see how shipping an app in WeChat is fundamentally different from shipping it on the App Store, bare technical details like programming language. Point 4 is the one-sided observation of the centralize-decentralize circle that is happening in all ecosystems. Once FAANG have purchased all the startups and apps, people will crave for new ones. Governments will even incentivize that. I think the only thing that can kill on-device apps in the next years is PWAs with WASM and friends (IF a central market place for PWAs develops). But Apple and Google will have it let that actively happen; and development paradigms might not even change that much, with Swift/Kotlin to WASM compilers in the works.