Just from a pure marketing perspective, look at all the insane hype they were able to generate due to possibility of a new physical form factor.
There’s no way in hell they could have generated $10M in pre-orders and potentially hundreds of millions in earned media coverage for the 700th app that’s basically a chatgpt api wrapper.
You’re absolutely right, it would “just be an app” and have a much harder time getting noticed.
But I really meant what I said too. It doesn’t matter how great your thing is, people complain to high health about spending $.99 on it. And God forbid you want to subscription even if it’s only $2 a year. And don’t ask for an IAP of any kind.
The app market is a disaster of ads because almost no one will accept anything else.
Even if everything ran fully on the device so they didn’t have any server costs of any kind I think they’d have a very very hard time making money off an app unless it was incredibly extraordinary.
