The Nintendo Difference.
I do see a nice side to having all the online stuff on your phone:
It keeps all of that UI on a separate screen, ready to access mid game and keeps all the communicating you do on your phone, which you carry around for ... communication! Makes sense to me why they went for this. Access to your friends and what they are playing anywhere anytime.
If you for example, use the app while on your way home from work/school you can start prepping a party and inviting friends into a game before you get home and start playing? You hit send/accept invite and join game from that app, and the Switch wakes up from sleep, boots the game up and connects you right into the game with your friends the moment you're about to walk into home ... that sounds pretty damn nice.
Or even when you are at home already and your cooking dinner in the kitchen you usually take your phone with you right? You can let you friends know that you can't join right now but you will after dinner, instead of letting them wait and give up by the time you get back to the Switch to check on messages and invites.
But yeah, it sounds good to me. Even if it is all still on your phone when you're playing on the Switch, you keep your phone on the side and you don't have to mess around with menus mid-game to handle online stuff.
If Nintendo has created a uniform matchmaking and controls for muting players, managing voice chat settings etc. for all games on the Switch, and developers don't have to do the UI work for that stuff then that is also pretty nice. Consistency is good, and less work for developers too. Less OS RAM usage too if they move all that stuff on the phone.
I do see them eventually adding in the functionality for simple things you can do on the Switch like join a random match online and joining friend's games, but all the communicating and friend management side of things will probably stay on the phone app to begin with until the backlash, which there looks like there might be hah.
I'm willing to give this a try Nintendo and if it works well enough for me well, no complaints!
I see it as one of those knee-jerk negative reactions 'cause Nintendo' like the big part of the presentation being on the Joy-con motion controls, and a lot of people and journalists and youtubers dismissing ARMS and 1 2 Switch because of it.
But peoples impressions of ARMS use of motion control that actually got to try it suggest it's way more responsive and accurate then Wii's, which is why Wii had a lot of waggle as its motion controls were crap even with motion plus.
That's my ramble anyway.
