Leadership Quote by John Fowler

In a single, almost shrugging sentence, Fowler smuggles in a quiet thesis about power: the mobile revolution didn’t just multiply screens, it multiplied constraints. “Hundreds of millions” functions like a political talking point, the kind of scale meant to trigger urgency and inevitability. But he pivots immediately from macro to micro - from booming adoption to the fussy reality that any developer, any institution, has to “know a bit” about what these devices can actually do. That modest phrasing is the tell. It’s not an ode to innovation; it’s a warning about fragmentation, uneven access, and the cost of pretending technology is uniform.

The intent reads as pragmatic governance-by-technology: if public services, campaigns, education, or commerce are going “mobile,” you can’t legislate or procure as if “a phone is a phone.” Capability becomes policy. Camera quality affects identity verification. Storage limits shape what apps can reasonably demand. Network variability decides whether a service is usable outside affluent urban pockets. Fowler’s developer framing is also strategic; it borrows credibility from the builder class while nudging political audiences toward a technocratic sensibility: competence over hype.

Subtextually, this is an argument against magical thinking in digital modernization. The real bottleneck isn’t adoption, it’s literacy - not just for citizens but for the people designing systems that increasingly stand in for the state. In that light, “approach it” sounds less like coding advice and more like a governing posture: meet people where their devices are, not where the press releases wish they were.