People just happen to carry their desktops on their pockets
You mean they carry their portable UNIX servers in their pockets with them. Since they all come with a web browser, there's your application's or your server's front end.
and use this thing called apps on them.
I have a few of those on my mobile UNIX server as well. Stupidest thing I've ever seen or used, "apps". What for, when they could have used a web browser to display their front ends, or could have ran on a backend server and just sent the display to the web browser? Most of those "apps" I use won't function without an InterNet uplink anyway... idiocy pur.
It's only ad absurdum if you're completely unaware of the fact that UNIX (in this case not GNU/Linux, but illumos / SmartOS) is a high performing operating system with extensive facilities for preemption and traceability, which makes it ideal for web applications, and at scale, too. Haven't heard of SmartOS yet, have you, since you claim UNIX unfit for cloud applications?
Also I don't see anything here on these APIs,
https://developer.android.com/guide/index.html
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element
That relate to these ones:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/