Are "boxes" really dying though? Android shipped 1 billion devices in 2014 [1]. That's a lot of market for a standardized bus with lots of processes on a single box. I don't see that changing any time in the next five years, and maybe beyond.
Linux is way too popular to not consider all the use cases. And "interesting" is not a good yardstick for where effort should be spent.
Today's mobile devices are mostly dumb terminals for the cloud. It's a portable always on VT100 for the 21st century. Web sites and apps are like giant VT macros. All the interesting stuff is elsewhere.
As they get more powerful I could see apps doing more interesting things locally, but in doing this they will mostly be talking to distributed systems over a network. (E.g. peer to peer net in apps.)
The last bastion of the box is PC, but that is also a mature and stagnant platform whose use cases are mostly served by what is already there.
Linux is way too popular to not consider all the use cases. And "interesting" is not a good yardstick for where effort should be spent.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/android-shipments-exceed-1-billion-...