I&#x27;m curious what you mean by &quot;mystery meat&quot;?  I assume it&#x27;s the use of icons and drawers to trigger functionality rather than labels and links?<p>That&#x27;s driven by screen size - there&#x27;s simply not enough screen real estate on a phone to label every button with words.  It does have a legit discoverability problem, which most folks in UX acknowledge but don&#x27;t know how to fix, given other constraints of the media.  I&#x27;ve seen a bunch of mobile apps with help overlays or tour videos the first time you run them, which can help a lot.  It gets back-ported to desktop apps because once people <i>do</i> learn the functionality, it leads to a cleaner, less cluttered UI.<p>I&#x27;ll also point out that early PCs had the same problem.  A typical PC from the early 1980s had 320x200 resolution, a little less than a smartwatch does today.  For most of the 80s and early 90s, the standard was VGA (640x480), slightly smaller than most smartphones today.  Icons were really common back then as well, they weren&#x27;t all that discoverable, but at least people read manuals occasionally.  Most folks don&#x27;t bother now.  Menus were another response to that problem, but they don&#x27;t really work on mobile because the tap target is too small to efficiently hit it (the navigation drawer &amp; hamburger menu is the modern-day equivalent of the menu).<p>The web - with its inherent discoverability and all of its space for explanatory text - didn&#x27;t really become popular until 1280x1024 displays became widespread.  I remember designing webapps for 800x600 screens; it was painful, and they had discoverability problems too.