When you're in the niche, it's hard to see out. I'm old enough to remember encountering the first computer magazine that didn't feature program listings (SoftTalk) and thinking who would want this thing? Programming is very much a niche activity (although I imagine that it's more a question of when rather than if that we'll see some sort of XCode for iOS).

My take on this is that programming may be niche now, but it shouldn't be. Simple scripting is useful and lets you easily perform tasks that would otherwise be repetitive.

I'm not saying everyone should be able to build a large application, but you shouldn't be stopped from building things on it, otherwise how will you even get started?

Computers that stop you from inspecting them and learning how they work build a moat between the users and developers of the system. That's the opposite of what I think we should be encouraging.

Shortcuts.app allows simple scripting on iOS and is free from Apple. Pythonista is also on iOS.

iOS already has plenty of basic programming apps for Python, C#, F#, Scheme, and naturally Swift.

Well programming is a less of niche than studio quality mic and recording they are promoting don’t you think?