The difference is that Microsoft very intentionally decided it was going to make .NET cross-platform as a strategic play. Apple has recently shown a willingness to get out of the way of cross-platform Swift, but I haven't yet seen evidence that they're throwing any significant weight behind it. They have an even worse track record than Microsoft did of investing heavily in locking developers into their ecosystem, so I'll have to see quite a bit of evidence to believe they're actually serious about cross-platform Swift.

I like that comparison! But it might require Apple’s perspective as a company to shift in the same way Microsoft’s did. We’ll see, I guess…

It might be too late. IMHO Microsoft also did transition too late and these days .NET is less relevant today than it used to be - even many microsoft apps are build using React Native or Electron.

> even many microsoft apps are build using React Native or Electron.

I doubt that .NET has much to do with it. There are just many more JavaScript developers who know how to make UIs.

That's because the web is cross platform, truly. It's not a separate issue - the prevalence of the web is exactly due to platforms like .NET being limited. If .NET (and others) were cross platform much earlier, I think many applications would be true apps instead of web apps right now.

As someone mostly focused on Java and .NET ecosystems, for the last 20 years, the problem isn't the transition, rather the team is hindered by upper management goals.

While they do their best to open source .NET and related SDK tooling, the whole IDE story has been a bit of a mess, rewriting VS4Mac only to kill it shortly after the rewrite reached 1.0, C# DevKit under the same license as VS, the stuff that will never leave Windows or VS to Mac/Linux, Xamarin.Forms rewrite, while not taking GNU/Linux into consideration, and using Catalyst for macOS MAUI backend, dotnet watch drama, some of the ASP.NET features seen as way to sell Azure stuff,....

If you look closer, you will notice that usually the React Native or Electron based applications are from business units that are mostly C++ focused, that never had great love for .NET in first place.

While the team tries to cater to new generations with making .NET development a great experience, even with some constraints in cross-platform deployments, I think they would gain more by fixing the bad perception .NET still gets in UNIX shops, which those upper management decisions don't make any better, regardless of how great .NET happens to be.