My app was doing really well in the App Store, and Apple was featuring it on billboards and TV ads. As an indie developer, it was the best thing I could have hoped for. I didn't want to mess up that relationship with Apple in any way. Being anti-MS throughout my youth probably didn't help either.

That might cover the initial development costs, but then you are signing up for a lifetime of support. $10k doesn't help much if there aren't enough recurring revenues. It sucks to launch an app then let it languish and have to kill it a year or two later.

How can you say that without knowing 1) what the app is and 2) what tools it was built with?

There's also the problem of ongoing maintenance on multiple platforms. In the best case, it was written with a dual platform toolkit (iOS and Android) and MS adds a 3rd platform to that toolkit to make it easy to port and maintain all three. Even if that were all true, it's won't be for every developer and you'll still have problems bringing people to the platform.

1) http://www.drumkit.co

2) Built in Objective-C with a custom audio engine in C++. Audio latency on Android was horrible at that time, MS was probably worse. It would have been a terrible app on those platforms if I did port it. This was before cross-platform toolkits existed. It needed to be a native app with low level access audio to hardware. I wasn't going to make an app where you tap a drum and wait 100ms to hear a sound.

> MS was probably worse.

Not that this counters anything you said nor that relevant to this topic, but as a nerd I am genuinely curious if this was true. I used to write lowlat audio stuff for iOS so I was well aware of the situation Android vs iOS (and because of my large interest in audio Android in general always makes me puke in my mouth a little -- like it is one of those neat little hidden indicators that while Apple is a hardware company, Google is fundamentally an ad company -- they really don't give a shit other than prioritizing ad delivery).

Anyway, Windows itself obviously has solid low-lat audio services, was it really that bad in the mobile stuff?

Not knowing much about the topic (but knowing a lot of an adjacent topic of getting NDK working for video+cv on Android) -- sometimes it comes down to documentation, existing examples, StackOverflow content, etc. Even if it is possible, if it isnt well documented, it doesnt matter.

I wouldn't help Microsoft for $10000000. I'm sure many others feel the same.

Is that an exaggeration or do you mean that literally?

I mean that literally. As an example see this [0] discussion from a few days ago. Not involving microsoft, but the guy literally gave up millions just because of morals. The principal is the same.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048

My surprise wasn't at the fact that someone would give up money due to morals; my surprise was at the fact that helping Microsoft (or putting ads in software, in VLC's case) would be considered a moral wrong. That sounds like quite an exaggeration to me. Microsoft has done a lot of good things too, and so have ads. The fact that they have negative aspects doesn't mean anything less than 90 degrees away from their direction is a moral wrong.

In VLC's case, it's a question of trust. The users of VLC trust the developer to not put ads on that software; it's breaking that trust that would be the moral wrong, not necessarily the ads.

I don't understand what notion of trust this is. If it auto-updates, maybe? But if you make the change clear before they update I don't see where there's a breach of trust.

10K is nothing for a decent mobile developer in the U.S. Even at a very low salary of $120K in a major metropolitan city. That's a month's salary. Could he have ported the app in a month working 160 hours?

For everything else than a small local app that is not exactly a very eye opening offer IMO.

Think about the learning time for the completely new eco system. The new hardware and software that is needed costs money as well.