Is one more annoying or restrictive than the other due to security or the way background multitasking and power saving works?
I'm thinking in the context of creating a mobile app just for my own use.
If you don't code for the native mobile platform, there are tools like MIT App Inventor which work better on Android than on iOS. The interfacing challenges you can find with iOS stem from other platforms accepting communication links that are known to be vulnerable and which require increasing the attack surface of your mobile device, crippling the autonomy or weakening privacy.
But if you are using more modern, up to date, communication mechanism (like TCP-IP based services over WiFi, BLE or an HID interface over USB C) then it's as simple on both as long as you understand the underlying requirements and concepts.
Developing for mobile requires to take into account that the device has a limited battery and you compete with other core services and other apps running on the device. Also because so much of our life is now in those devices (it's my phone, my credit card, my agenda, my mail system, my internet access, my radio, ...) that anything threatening the device security or battery life should be strongly evaluated.
Do you know if apps like App Inventor and RemoteXY are essentially sand-boxed web browsers?
I'm guessing that javascript and HTML is generated by the Arduino library which itself was generated by the development environment, or something like that?
They are development platforms providing simplified tools for creating mobile or IoT applications.
MIT App Inventor generates Java code behind the scenes based on your block-based programming logic. This code is then compiled into an Android Package file using standard Android development tools. So the apps created are native and run on the Android operating system, not within a web browser.
RemoteXY is different. It's a platform designed for creating user interfaces to control microcontrollers. It generates code that allows microcontroller devices to interact with a companion app on a smartphone or tablet. This companion app is native - I don't know the details but I suspect the UI is basically serialised into a format that can be interpreted by the companion app to present the UI.
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