Because that's a terrible way to interact with computers for 99% of applications. Now the market is so big, we have enough customers to justify a polished, eas

Because that's a terrible way to interact with computers for 99% of applications. Now the market is so big, we have enough customers to justify a polished, easy to use, featureful app for every task. And people want security, meaning we need lots and lots of boilerplate to deal with all the permissioned APIs, plus we want reliability, so we can't just let people peek and poke. If we let people do that the app store would fill up with apps that used it, and half of them would be unreliable, and stuff would suck. In fact, if there was a prompt at all, hackers could trick people into typing evil commands like they do to Linux newbies. Then those of us with tech experience would have to deal with it. Much better to offer equivalent capability in a way that doesn't have an easy to exploit hole on the human side. Smartphones DO encourage programming. There's like a million apps. They don't need a basic prompt, they just need to be there and really capable and make people feel its worth learning to develop for them. There are various sandboxed easy to use dev apps on Android for those who want to do old school 80s BASIC stuff. And it's a pretty cool thing, but it's best kept where it belongs, in an app, not conflicting with the primary use case of the phone. I do wish Google would support Flutter a little better and make stuff easier so we didn't need buggy third party libs though.