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This looks like an extreme version of a thesis I've had for a while: mobile devices are portable dumb terminals for the cloud.

This basically drives the entire mobile UI remotely. It's like 21st century touch based VT macros.

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> mobile devices are portable dumb terminals for the cloud

Catchy headline, but you and I both know that modern phones are extremely powerful computing devices.

But do phones have to be so powerful? If they are dumb terminals, could we get smaller form factors, longer battery life and make them more disposable for the billions of people that cant pay $$$ for a device?

You do realize that the radios in a phone eat more battery than the CPU under regular compute workloads?

A dumb terminal would still need some kind of network stack (munchy munchy battery life).

Maybe something like a kindle but with apps like WhatsApp, Twitter etc. optimized for e-ink displays.

I saw a kind of interesting device recently with a regular screen on the front and e-ink screen on the back, the Yotaphone 2: https://yotaphone.com/gb-en/

Very cool, I think.

SHHHHHH! (whispered) We don't want our users knowing that. We don't want them finding out they have a choice of managing their own pony-related data, rather than letting us at Bronygram do that for them. So we're going to stay on message and talk up "cloud computing" and convince them their very powerful computing devices are just dumb terminals, so they remain on our service.

this flies in the face of all the mobile trends... smartphones are getting MUCH faster/more powerful every year.

That may be the case, but mobile OSes and apps are designed around the cloud-centric service-centric consumer model that much more closely resembles the mainframe/VT paradigm. iOS is more extreme than Android in this area, but both platforms are locked down pretty hard against user control of their own device.

Most of that power is being used for UI.

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