> smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity
this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.
image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.
this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.
image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.