Mobile development looks simple from the outside—but it's one of the most demanding areas in software engineering.

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Mobile development is a demanding field requiring careful management of limited hardware resources, unpredictable network conditions, strict app store review processes, and high privacy expectations. Developers must optimize for smooth performance, handle offline capabilities, and ensure robust security, all while meeting high user expectations and dealing with difficult testing and debugging processes.

Why Building Mobile Apps Is So Much Harder Than It Looks

Constraint #1: Limited Hardware Resources

Constraint #4: High Privacy and Security Demands

Constraint #5: Testing and Debugging Are Harder

This is the same reason why software is so crap these days (no, it is not acceptable for a software to take 2, 3 seconds to load):
There is a theory that software used to be a lot faster in the days of 486, Pentium, etc. (remember: those machines run at 66Mhz and had some 4 to 8 MEGAbytes of RAM (yes, 1/2048 of that a base M4 has today). Back then, people who wrote software had two qualities:
<ol>
<li>They knew what they were doing</li>
<li>They have huge constraints on both memory and CPU, so the code HAS to be optimized (it wasn’t a choice)</li>
</ol>
So, back in the day, Photoshop loaded in a matter of seconds, Visual Studio took as far as 3 seconds, if I remember correctly, Excel was almost instantaneous. Remember: 66Mhz against 5Ghz. 8Mb against 32Gb. Slow as hell hard disks with some Mb/s against nVme with hundreds of Gb/s.
And that’s why, by using a crap untyped interpreted language you spent 114Mb of RAM to display this very page and it consumes A LOT of time to load, on a freakinsh 5Ghz machine, 128Gb RAM, nvme.

I think the other big point here, under the The App Store Bottleneck but not mentioned… it’s a huge point. Profitability.
When you put an app on the stores, if you want to make money and offer purchases you have to integrate with both stores, and they want to take 30% of your profit. That’s a huge margin to lose.
And if you want to build around that, you have to build a website anyways, and then you can’t use the Google Play/Apple stores for purchasing. You have to figure out a redirection mechanism.
This has been the #1 issue on apps with my clients. I’ve launched over 10 apps on the store for clients and it always comes up. Every client wants 100% of the profit but also wants the seamless payment integrations. It’s just not possible.

Your article is fine. Till now, nobody can answer my the question why do we need mobile app?

Usually because 98% of time you are trying to run the goddamn project as it never compiles. Yes I am looking at you react native