Comment by spyremeown

Other comments have put better than I could, but I'll add that what people call ecosystems nowadays is completely unthinkable in embedded. Sometimes you have critical applications and you bet you need to certify every single line of code that goes into your application. Small embedded devices are more geared towards engineering than other kinds of development, and in my opinion that's why applications work well, in comparison with the mess we have in the web nowadays, for example.