I agree. Almost anyone of these one size fits all approaches hits a wall sooner or later. Besides very basic applications, I would never make use of frameworks like Flutter or React Native. Same goes for Windows Universal Apps. Great concepts, but not very feasible in reality for slightly complex apps with good UX.

Do you think it is worth the increased time to start out as a native app, or is it still worth rolling your MVP as flutter/reactive native?

IMO, roll your MVP with something like React Native, although it all depends how important the user experience is for your end users.

Snapchat built with some platform-independent UI toolkit would have felt kind of wrong, and the speed at which I've seen teenagers use it (this was years ago) shows that they would have been frustrated with anything that is slow-ish. I assume similar trends dominate for TikTok and Instagram today.

So unless you're attracting a very hip, fast-moving, perhaps even young-person's market, you probably just want an app that basically works and is available to folks on whichever phone they use. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin / .NET MAUI will all get you there.

This depends on the number of platforms you're trying to support.

iOS, Android, mobile web, Windows and Linux? Flutter or Expo.

I strongly disagree. This is just big companies artificially separating their market segments to argue against too large of a market, and preserve their enormous profits with their huge percentage take. The world would be much better off with multiple stores. It will take legal action by the eu, and it will be hard, these rich companies are very influential. In the us we have too much capture of federal politicans, I only hope the eu can push it.

I hope multiple stores shake a bit the iPad ecosystem. It's a great device and, unlike in mobile, there's no competition.

Android tablets are pretty bad. Google dropped the ball, although they seem to be coming back.

iPads could be fantastic devices to program in, but they are quite crippled by limitations.

Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.

I believe that Google's ball drop with tablets has to do with that the phone manufacturers that Google partners with for Android are not as interested in tablets (likely using wifi) as they are with phones. Combine that with a lack of standardization and lack of focus for the tablet form factor... and that's what you've got.

The iPad, on the other hand was the original "this is what we want". The iPad was the first thing that Apple was trying to make.

> Work on the iPad itself actually traces back to 2004, when designer Jonathan Ive and others crafted a new tablet prototype. The product was originally supposed to ship before the iPhone, but the company came to decide the latter was more important, premiering it in 2007 using similar technologies.

( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/03/a-brief-history-o... )

So from the very beginning with the iDevice, the idea of different form factors and sizes was part of how it was written rather than as a phone that grew bigger.

They've been trying to make the iPad since the Apple Newton. The tech to do it just wasn't there.

The desktop OEMs lament their inability to differentiate their hardware offerings. I had always wondered why some of them didn't see the opportunity to enter the tablet space on Android as a path to differentiation. The only risk I would imagine would be the potential cannibalization of their laptop lines, but that really shouldn't stop them.

The cannibalization is one part of it (compare Apple - https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-on-cannibalization-201... and https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/apples-dwind... -- Jobs reportedly said “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”)

The other part of it is that android has been poorly designed for the tablet interface. For an OEM to try to make a tablet out of android they would have to invest significant software development resources into what would amount to be a fork of android (compare Amazon Fire tablets). While they likely have some software developers, they probably don't have enough to maintain that amount of development on android (and always being behind with Google preferring phones).

... and even if they were close to parity with Android (and the challenge that would imply at trying to keep their devices up to date - with the largest investment customers would expect them to last longer) you would still have difficulties with the developers for Android aren't making things that fit well in the tablet form factor (Amazon was trying to bribe/incentivize developers to write for its form factor - https://readwrite.com/amazon-give-developers-rewards-build-f... ).

All that means that unless Google wants to do it and you're willing to go head to head with Amazon its probably not that good of an investment of time, reputation, and resources.

> Boutique software companies, such as Panic or Omni Group, plus other developers could really extend the ecosystem beyond content consumption and simple document creation tasks.

If that’s the case why hasn’t Omni or Panic written these apps already?

The 30% cut Apple takes is indeed large. But any new store will likely attract only a small fraction of all App Store customers.

Can you help me understand this better?

AFAIK it's because you can't publish an iPadOS app on the App Store that allows you to compile and run native code within the app. So there are "cloud IDEs" for iPadOS, and local IDEs for interpreted languages for iPadOS, but no local IDEs for compiled languages for iPadOS.

A third-party App Store would presumably not inherently have this restriction (although individual third-party App Stores might.)

I'm currently on a four-person team developing/maintaining a popular React Native app. Working with React Native is awful, but having two of us doing Android and two doing iOS would be worse.

Yeah, sort of how Microsoft could argue that there exists two separate markets for Windows running on stationary compute devices and Windows for mobile devices. Except this is a sad joke and letting Apple get away with two devices running the same OS would be playing into their hand that they stacked years ago when they split them off. What is up with the enormous amount of people on this site who are inexplicably apologetic to Apple and other FAANG giants.

I don't think it's apologetic, it's two different approaches. MS has chosen to try to kill 2 birds with one stone, and Apple has allowed their devices to become more focused. As someone with an iPad, I appreciate Apple not trying to force that iPhone and iPad apps be the same thing. The experience is better.

This is hilarious considering that the classical, yet irrational, fear amongst long time MacOS users is that Apple might be secretly planing an OS convergence. This is usually perceived as doomsday for MacOS and have been feared by some for up to 15 years.

You are basically stating the opposite while completely ignoring the actual complexity of such an hypothetical merge for codebases that forked 15 years ago. They share a kernel and some API, but on the UI side recent cross platform framework are more like a proof of concept than a production ready thing.

Another thing that's hilarious[1] is in the Epic lawsuit Apple wanted to define the market as big as possible while here they define it as small as possible.

[1] not actually hilarious

Almost like the word "market" can mean different things in different contexts. Some people define it as the place you get produce... crazy!

Catalyst, fka Marzipan, definitely did not help alleviate the concerns that Apple would prefer for the operating systems to be unified.

Them pulling ill-suited features over to macOS, like the Control Center[0] and toggles, also give me pause.

[0] Which lives in the menubar, lacks any keyboard accessibility, and introduced bizarre new interface behaviors, e.g. multi-step dropdowns where you click inside the dropdown to navigate back. Ugh.

The OSes have been the same since forever. It's just the same macOS kernel, filesystem, and basic userland with different UI and a few different core libs (given the different form factor and hardware features needed to hook to).

Most of the same people that fear the convergence also ask for "iPadOS" and "iOS" to be more like the Mac (add mouse support, multitask like the Mac, and so on).

So what they do fear is the mythical "dumbing down" of Mac, as in the outcry when Logic got a different skin, and everybody losts their minds as if it's now "just Garageband Pro" (meanwhile it has never been more powerful). Same for FCP (where a few features were lost due to the rewrite, not for any dumbing down).

I mean convergence was a 100% goal internally when I worked at Apple 8 years ago. afaict they’ve been gradually bringing the experiences and software stacks closer and closer together and they’ve been locking down MacOS more and more.

Not sure why you see it as an irrational fear. What timeline are they actually working under / how are they prioritizing that convergence? I don’t know but it’s clear it will happen. I’m sure there’s a lot of unification going on of background services (radio stacks, security hardening, etc) in addition to more visible UI pieces.

The Microsoft comparison would be more like the Microsoft Store on Windows (the PC client version) vs. Xbox.

Would it? Xbox never ran Windows and never had access to Windows applications as far as I'm aware.

The App Stores share user accounts, send a shared invoice at the end of the month, and many of the apps you buy are compatible with multiple platforms (eg. my calendar app comes with an iOS, a watchOS and an iPadOS version).

And the store is called just "App Store" on every platform.

Claiming that I somehow used 3 different stores to buy a single app is an accounting trick, nothing else.

But does the iOS app run directly on the iPad? (with a good user experience?)

It does not run on watchOS without extra work, correctly?

I think their position is kinda defensible here. Yeah maybe with iPad/iOS not so much, but for the other devices, definitely

That's a weird argument. Are Aldi supermarkets the same, "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2". It's still really the same and particularly they advertise it to be the same.

I think there should be a hard rule, that if companies try to sell something as the same to consumers, they immediately loose if they try to argue they are separate things when it comes to regulations.

But all Aldi stores sell the same stuff more or less

> "no the one on 5th avenue sells vegetables in isle 5 and the one on 3rd they are on isle 2"

But that's not what's happening here

Is an iPad app the same thing as an iPhone app? Or a watch app?

If an iPhone app took minimal work to work on the iPad, then I'd say it's the same thing, sure

You can literally run iPhone apps on an iPad and have been able to since day one. You can also run some iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac if the developer allows it. Often the iPhone/iPad apps are the same binary and the same purchase gets you both versions, you just get a different UI depending on the device.

I don't think it matter what the developers do on the backend. If I buy XYZ app for iPhone, does that mean I also have XYZ app for iPad (if its available)? If so, they feel like the same store.

That's an implementation detail that the dev needs to worry about.

As a customer, I go to the store page on one of my devices, it says the app is compatible with my device x, y and z. I click the "Buy" button once. Then I get the app on all my devices. I get a receipt that shows I purchased one item.

But what Apple is saying is that I somehow used 3 independent stores?

Thanks, I was not so familiar with the behaviour of the app store for multiple devices like that

And yes, if you click buy once and get 3 different apps, then I'd say it's the same store

Counting iOS, iPadOS, and macOS app stores as different is going to be challenged by the EU for sure, since their own marketing touts the 'unified app store experience' of buying once across all platforms.