Personally, I am on iOS, and while iOS has gone through a number of, occasionally frustrating, framework changes, it has never felt particularly fragmented.<p>My impression is also, that it has changed a lot on Android.<p>Personally, I also think that, in the beginning, many parts of iOS-development felt more modern than OSX, and that this was the platform where things were maturing faster.<p>I would say, that mobile development is like development on most other platforms these days. You have an increasingly larger choice of languages, and the Mobile CPUs are certainly powerful enough that you can build very complex apps, where elegant code is an advantage.<p>The challenge is to keep things simple from a user perspective.<p>It really is (still) a wonderful domain to develop in, and I doubt there is more debugging or trial-and-error than any other platform!<p>I worked for a company that embedded Linux on a custom device about 15 years ago. That was a horrible debugging, trial-and-error experience. The language was C. Chosen as a compromise because of the hardware specs, but not an obvious choice for the applications we built. Certainly not today. Most of the development team was frustrated with the development process, and I actually left the company before the product was put in production.<p>So I think, I understand your line of thought, but I don&#x27;t recognize it in today&#x27;s mobile development.