> the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level.
Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. They only care that it works on their platform. As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc.
The only people who should be upset about cross-platform compatibility issues are budget-conscious managers and unfortunate OSS devs.
>As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc.
This is like saying "As construction workers we should be cheering for natural disasters, because there will be more work for construction workers to rebuild destroyed cities."
Job security is great- but at what cost? I'd rather see developers making completely new things than wasting time porting from one native platform to another.
And honestly, whether as a construction worker or a programmer, I, too, would rather be building new things than rebuilding the same goddamn thing over and over again.
What a hyperbolic analogy. No, porting to new platforms is not like recovering from a natural disaster, and rooting for competing platforms is not like cheering for the misery of a disaster.
And for the record, doing a port well (as opposed to a hacky, broken one) frequently requires lots of creativity and technical ingenuity.
Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. They only care that it works on their platform. As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc.
The only people who should be upset about cross-platform compatibility issues are budget-conscious managers and unfortunate OSS devs.