I agree with the author, but not for the same reason they mentioned. Currently, the biggest problem in mobile is discovery. If you're not in the top 25 for your category, its difficult to gain enough organic traffic to build a sustainable business on. Companies much larger than you are buying out all the paid inventory. As a startup, you'll be doubly hurt because no one will know who you are. So you have all the problems of sustaining as a brand on the web plus the added disadvantage of surviving on a platform where discovery is inherently broken.
So unless you think long and hard about how to solve distribution and come up with some interesting hacks, you're at a large disadvantage from day 0.
This is assuming the product you are developing is a consumer product with the intetion of marketing through an app store of some kind.
There are plenty of app markets for which an app store is only a method of distribution (the only one, really), and sales/marketing is handled in the traditional manner.
Many different ways. For organic traffic theres links, search results, facebook posts and other social media. For the app store theres added friction bc users have to install the app on their phone and there will be a dropoff between viewing a listing and downloading (and also from downloading to launching). For paid traffic, its much easier to build a sustainable business on the web because the costs are, for the most part, cheaper.
So unless you think long and hard about how to solve distribution and come up with some interesting hacks, you're at a large disadvantage from day 0.