It's an unrealistic advice. It's easy to say it when your income is not dependent on these apps. But if you have an app in a marketplace that pays your bills, you can't afford to risk it just because you don't like dev tools...
It's only unrealistic if you aren't willing to adapt to changing market conditions.
But the market conditions are what's holding us in place.
This may not be what HN readers want to hear, but users, not developers, have the primary influence over what the market is.
is the market still apps? I don't work on mobile, so I guess I wouldn't know, but my feeling was that people install way fewer apps than they used to
As a mobile developer, I can confirm this. They mostly just install all their social networks and a couple of games, but there's still demand from businesses who want their own apps.