Have you ever tried to
create anything with a smartphone? That path has an incredible amount of resistance. More importantly, the arbitrary hurdles cannot be moved.
On a desktop PC, I can install whatever Linux distro I want. That can give me much greater access to a serious development environment than even Windows could dream of. Android feels like a toy in comparison, and iOS is like one of those fake laptops they sell to toddlers.
Even when my Android phone has an unlockable bootloader, it's still unlikely that I will be able to run a desktop-equivalent Linux distro on it. Chances are, I'm left with a less-restrictive flavor of Android. That's the best case scenario, and it's absolutely worse than the average case I grew up with.
It's not entirely about resistance, either. People follow their interests within a reasonable amount of effort. At the end of the day, they balance the two.
What opportunities to mobile computing users have to follow what interests? Social media provides the least resistance by several orders of magnitude.
We can and should change this landscape. We should be minimizing the opportunity cost of creative computing, instead of trying to convince billions of people to throw the entire thing out the window.
