When people talk about how quickly technology evolves, they often point to mobile. And they’re right. Mobile development has gone through more radical change in two decades than desktop software did in forty.
At the beginning, it was almost laughably primitive. Building for the first iPhone meant working with Objective-C, UIKit, and Apple's strict rules about what you could and couldn’t do. Android wasn’t much better—it was Java, but not the kind you knew. Both platforms felt like isolated little islands. To support both, you had to build two apps, hire two teams, and accept the inefficiency as a cost of doing business.
But the inefficiency was intolerable. Startups were racing against time, and enterprises weren’t thrilled about paying twice either. So, predictably, we got cross-platform experiments. PhoneGap, Xamarin, Titanium—tools that promised you could “write once, run anywhere.” The problem was that the promise was bigger than the reality. Apps built this way felt wrong. Buttons lagged. Animations stuttered. They were good enough for prototypes, but rarely for serious products.
Then came React Native and Flutter. Suddenly, cross-platform wasn’t just a hack—it was viable. The web generation of developers brought their habits and frameworks, and the gap between “native” and “cross-platform” narrowed. You could move fast and ship something that felt good in users’ hands. It wasn’t perfect—debugging was harder, performance sometimes shaky—but it was a major leap forward.
Meanwhile, the platforms themselves matured. Apple and Google fought an arms race of developer tools: Swift replaced Objective-C, Kotlin rose beside Java. APIs multiplied, frameworks layered on frameworks. What used to take hundreds of lines now took ten. But with the new power came new complexity. Entire teams of engineers could spend months just keeping up with the changes.
Today, mobile development sits in an odd place. On one hand, it’s never been easier to build an app. Tools like Expo or SwiftUI let a single developer spin up something polished in weeks. On the other hand, the ceiling of what users expect has never been higher. They want seamless animations, offline support, battery efficiency, integrations with every other app. To reach that bar, you often need the full weight of a specialized team again.
What’s striking is how the cycle mirrors other areas of software. The history of mobile is a pendulum: from native to abstraction, from abstraction back to native, then to smarter abstraction again. Each swing makes things a little more accessible, a little more powerful, but also a little more complex under the hood.
And now AI is starting to get involved. We may soon have systems that generate large chunks of mobile code, or even entire apps, from a conversation. If that happens, the pendulum may not swing back at all. We may end up in a world where you don’t worry about frameworks or languages—only about what you want the app to do.
The deeper lesson here is that mobile development is less about technology than about human impatience. People want to move faster, spend less, and build more. Every tool, from Objective-C to React Native to AI-assisted coding, is an attempt to close that gap. And the cycle will keep repeating until, eventually, there’s no gap left.