At first, I was skeptical of the focus on mobile. But now, I'm on board.
Quotes from The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
I mentioned this quote before. But this applies well to mobile/onboarding. I'm particularly sold on the idea that low rewards have a higher impact on poorer countries. And poorer countries are on mobile platforms. It just follows that this is a good area for development.
This focus on mobile doesn't mean the desktop will be hindered. In the web development industry, there's a buzz-word: Responsive Design.
This is the focus on UX components that scale. If you're on Safari, you can take a look at this in development mode:
That yellow warning triangle is telling me to reload the page, in case the site needs to re-render the screen for my "mobile" device. But when I reload, there's no difference. This is because steemit.com is already using responsive development practices. Growing the application with this philosophy is a very good thing and it's clear that they're serious about it.