This expressed expectation of "how the world works" is the perception of a monolith, however. There is no divine right or reason for things to be designed online-first, except for incentives to the service providers. When somebody designs an app to be online-first, they are choosing to be a service provider, and not an app author. This distinction may not be clear to developers who came to be in a culture where online-first is a first order concern, but it is immediately clear to anybody who "owns" the "app" in question when the service is either neglected or decommissioned in a few years, or is otherwise made inaccessible via the internet.