Access is an interesting animal.
It’s a Windows desktop app included in the Microsoft Office family originally touted as a low-code no-code relational database management tool.
It received decent attention for a while, getting relatively serious new features through the Office 95 days, on through Office XP, and into Office 2010. Since then, it has continued to receive tweaks although it has maintained status as the “red-headed step child” of the Office family. It does not receive the same enhancements as the other Office applications as it really has never quite fit into the mold of other Office productivity apps like Outlook, Word, or Excel. It has a million things it can do and this doesn’t translate well to phone interfaces and the COM model never really translated to other platforms.
Access is a type of Swiss Army knife that relates datasources together and allows you to build data sets and visualize them in various ways. Forms are a way of working with the data one record (or more) at a time and allow a developer to control user input.
There was a push back in Office 2010 to make a web enabled version of Access through Sharepoint, but the downfall was that it was incompatible with any current database and you basically had to write a new app from scratch using web forms and other controls. It was wildly unsuccessful and was scrapped quickly, along with plans to move Access from it’s native “DAO” data engine to “ADO” which is still the current web and .NET technology.
Access development really is a skill unto itself. The benefits of Access include rapid exploration and ability to create new features, an extremely deep “scripting” language comparable to an old version of Visual Basic which can do most of what VB 6 could do, and uses similar object models to the other desktop Microsoft products and desktop Microsoft Office Apps (with Outlook beginning to move away from this, but with a decade or so of support with Access still in it’s future).
An entire ecosystem of plugins and developers has arisen specifically around Access and there are dedicated Access developers out there who only develop in Access.
All of this to say that it is unlikely that we will see Access die anytime soon. It will likely live on for a long time and I don’t see it’s niche disappearing unless COM applications (basically native Windows applications) disappear. This would require the Windows OS to go in a different direction, dropping support for a TON of current software.
So understand your niche and continue to enjoy the ride. It will last quite a while!