Sure the developing world still needs very cheap phones, and they require software close to the hardware.
But in the developed world phones and tables get closer to a full PC every day. They basically are tiny PCs.
And exactly how the web made Windows and OSX, and Linux less interesting, so it will make the mobile OSs less interesting.
Because even if you can't get close to the hardware, and might require user permissions to access hardware features, still a java script and HTML5 based web app can do almost anything you want on mobile hardware. History keeps repeating itself.
Sure the developing world still needs very cheap phones, and they require software close to the hardware.
But in the developed world phones and tables get closer to a full PC every day. They basically are tiny PCs.
And exactly how the web made Windows and OSX, and Linux less interesting, so it will make the mobile OSs less interesting.
Because even if you can't get close to the hardware, and might require user permissions to access hardware features, still a java script and HTML5 based web app can do almost anything you want on mobile hardware. History keeps repeating itself.