Battery swap and back on the road. Obviously moving to this model would require changing conventional thinking. Cars don’t need to be parked, just like an IP address doesn’t need to “rest”. It’s just a pool of resources.
If you're talking about developing a hobby app, I'd recommend using something like react native. The DX on react (not react native necessarily) is unmatched, and easier to pick up than iOS development from the ground up. After that, you can publish the app through Expo, which is an app on the App Store. No $99 fee that way, great DX, deploying is easy and quick, a great middle ground for hobbies.
Alternatively, make a website like you normally would and in Safari you can "Add to Home Screen". You don't even need a domain name, just save the IP to your Home Screen. Native APIs for websites come a long way.
They could simply consume GPT to make their product better. They control a niche that is smaller than the broader capabilities of GPT. It might make it easier for someone to enter their space, but this isn’t a replacement for what they provide. I’ll continue to use the extensions and editor because it provides a better experience overall with streamlining capabilities.
In my experience, I'm far more likely to run into database bottlenecks early on than web server bottlenecks (largely through hastily and poorly written queries or unchecked Eloquent N+1 problems). I'd opt for the managed DB so that there's limited chance that the database will affect other processes on the webserver (including serving requests, handling background and scheduled jobs, etc.)
It also makes it easier to scale within Linode/Digital Ocean if you find yourself needing to do that before the more complicated AWS infrastructure is ready.