I often feel very stuck trying to do power-user things on my phone. It can be something as simple as file converting or as complex as finding a setting buried in a byzantine menu.

The frustrating part is that phones today can absolutely handle the performance needs; developers just refuse to expose that capability for a myriad of reasons. My guess is it’s a mix of a smaller technical audience on mobile and the headache of dealing with constantly changing APIs. Or maybe it’s Apple’s HIG principles and their insistence on dumbing down every interface to its simplest form (which has its pros and cons) but at the end of the day, no one wants to deal with 4,000 little switches just to get one thing working.

Still, I believe the balance has fallen on the side of “easy to use” far more often than it has on the “growing power user” path. I find myself constantly using the desktop version of a service in mobile Safari, and it performs perfectly fine, so performance clearly isn’t the barrier. The truth is, there probably isn’t enough demand for most people to want these tools, and it takes significant upkeep to expose highly technical features on a device that struggles to show that much density at once (though, in my opinion, that’s a lame excuse).

The friction of mobile development, with its restrictive APIs and the entitlements required for app stores, just disenfranchises developers from even attempting to make more technically capable tools. This is why I love that tools like Claude Code are making it easier for me to build my own power tools that run on the web, which I can spin up and deploy quickly to bypass those restrictions. I’m just going to keep tapping into that potential because it’s there.

As a side note: this is also the huge advantage of a home lab (which I know the majority of people will never get into). Being able to spin up your own tools, host them on your own server, and use them remotely to do whatever you want? That’s pretty neat. Now where do I find an extra Mac to play “server” with me? 🙂