&gt; Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server.<p>This is not true of games.  Can you name any?  Yes, multiplayer games require a server component, but they&#x27;re not thin clients.  And games that are not multiplayer generally don&#x27;t require a server at all except possibly for DRM.  People don&#x27;t like wasting their data plan unnecessarily and they like being able to play in subway tunnels.<p>If you think about the economics of it, this makes sense.  Margins are razor slim; you need to be able to profit off of whatever is left after the app store takes its cut of your $0.99-4.99 retail price.  Having to run and maintain a fleet of servers to handle your games simply doesn&#x27;t make sense.  Better (and easier programmatically) to take advantage of the powerful processors on the devices themselves and have the games run locally.  Think of something like Civilization, that has a mobile app; why on Earth would you want a central server that would have to run god knows how many millions of AIs when the phones could simply calculate that themselves?