Nindalf is correct: the primary reason is lack of desire. But there are other reasons - these are the reasons that people who already like to program don't do

Nindalf is correct: the primary reason is lack of desire. But there are other reasons - these are the reasons that people who already like to program don't do so on their phones. Optimistically, improved interfaces (e.g. AI listening to your words and groking your system diagrams) will improve the programmability of phones perhaps even beyond the laptop. The difference between Apple IIe and the iPhone 12 is scale. 40 years of Moore's law means the phone you hold in your hand has roughly 2^10 more components at 1/100 the volume. Early computers, you could look at them with your eyes, fix (and break) them with your hands. The same was true of the experience of using a computer - it was all very "close to the metal", with small, simple abstractions (like booting into BASIC, or restarting your computer with a new floppy in it - computers were essentially stateless). It feels like a stroke of luck to have grown up alongside each iteration of PC technology because I can see how it would be overwhelming to try to understand it starting from 0.