Comment by _bxg1

The key factor, I believe, is how much needs to be shown onscreen at the same time. Your newsfeed can be compressed to a smaller screen because you can simply show less of it, without sacrificing the core goal of the view. Whereas, consider a desktop app with multiple panes that show different information about the same subject. The default way to condense this would be to arrange the panes into a single vertical column that you could scroll up and down. But if you need to see them all at once, this adaptation is useless. At some point there are only so many physical inches of screen space.