This is coming from an EE gone web developer who now works as an embedded and hardware engineer. There are trade offs in engineering disciplines that you don’t generally find in highly abstracted web development environments.
What is "engineering"? Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items.
A software "engineer" is simply someone who make use of scientific principles and computer languages to build and/or maintain software.
Although the above may be technically correct, part of me thinks the word engineering might actually be a moving target. It isn't what it used to be, and perhaps the new definition will stick.
As a application developer you have the luxury of relying on the underlying frameworks to do most of the leg-work for you. As long as you follow basic principals within the framework you can have a reasonable degree of confidence that your application will run and the end product will probably be OK. Things like iOS development are so heavily streamlined that sticking to the docs will mean from a technical perspective the app should be fairly solid.
Of course, it does depend on the application because you could be solving complex problems that are outside of the framework, so I'm not dismissing the engineering definition entirely, but generally speaking I think most developers are developers, not engineers. Developers leverage existing systems and build on-top of them.
Juxtaposing the idea of a web or iOS developer with an electronic engineer that is building a physical product with a microcontroller. The application is written in a "bare-metal" embedded environment which generally only relies on a Hardware Abstraction Layer (which basically just maps memory locations and may provide initialization code for various peripherals) and virtually nothing else. The application will likely need to employ interrupt handlers with safety (Mutex/Semapores etc) that must execute within time restrictions or the system will crash, complex DMA buffering techniques and integration with other hardware using physical layer protocols (SPI, I2C, I2S, 802.11 WIFI, USB, etc). The transfer protocol chosen will have its own trade-offs, such as speed vs noise and then noise compensation techniques will need to be used such as increasing the spacing between PCB tracks, using ground planes etc, but these then also have trade-offs because your device may have space restrictions.
The list goes on for a while, and every decision that is made eventually enforces a limitation somewhere else in the system. Engineering (in my mind) is about the balancing of these decisions/limitations to ensure the system runs harmoniously and within the defined constraints.
Similarly, even on a team that does engineer a distributed system, only some of the team members do that sort of activity, the other members follow the set conventions so things work out. Eventually they could work their way up to doing 'real' engineering. I really don't like calling only some things engineering as much as I agree that software development doesn't have the rigor of traditional engineering fields.