The complexity of the platform's capabilities and the complexity of the toolchain don't seem to be necessarily related to each other; in fact, by pointing out the sophistication of the platform, you're sort of making his point for him. Writing a GPS mapping application for the Commodore 64 would be a vastly complicated undertaking, but writing one for a modern smartphone should be trivial precisely because the phone has an integrated GPS module and the processing power to parse its output in realtime without having to implement a vast set of hacks and optimizations. The point is that relative to the platform's capabilities, his desires aren't any more complex than those of the basement coder on a C64 thirty years ago, so why does he need to contend with excessively complicated development and deployment tools to implement them?
Even if I grant that his desires aren't more complex relative to the platform, that doesn't help, because the platform is enormously more complex.
But his desires are more complex relative to the platform. He wants to do open-source development with distributed version control and collaborative bug tracking. Try that on a C64.
Further, the C64 was a consumer device, carefully engineered to make it easy for novices to a constrained set of basic stuff. I agree that we should have Android development tools like that. Sort of a Logo or Visual Basic for the modern age. But the current mobile tools are for professional developers to do complex, professional things. That's because they mostly want to make complicated, highly polished, consumer-friendly apps.
Those tools may also be needlessly complex for the purpose, and I think we should fix that. But we won't do that if we can't acknowledge the essential complexity of the domain. As Einstein wrote, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
