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.