In addition to this, I think one thing many people discount is that when you have a good cross-platform dev experience, your devs can actually build more features that you care about much faster than if they're porting and debugging for every app platform. Obviously some amount of cross-platform validation and debugging is always necessary, but the simple fact is that OSes are just not differentiated enough these days to make me think "Oh yay, I'm so glad this developer spent months on the perfect 'native experience'" - when they actually could have been building shit I really need.
> Your devs can actually build more features that you care about much faster than if they're porting and debugging for every app platform.
But do I care about those features? Do they actually make the software better?
I believe a major reason software gets worse over time is because companies add features which detract from the app's core purpose and make it more difficult to use. "Oh, you like Dropbox because it's a reliable way to sync files between computers? Great, let's add in a password manager and a word processor!"
Prime example of this are the Adobe CS apps. As far as my needs are concerned, CS1 or CS2 is more than enough. Very few features added since are of benefit to me, and yet I have to live with these apps becoming ever-slower, ever-larger, ever-muddier balls of mud as a result of those features being added.
At this point for some categories of apps I would gladly pay a subscription for a product that’s feature locked, with 100% of development efforts going into fixing bugs, improving performance, and keeping pace with OS updates.
> when they actually could have been building shit I really need.
The shit I really need is almost always what I would have gotten if the developer had focused on a "perfect native experience" in the first place. Multi-window support, keyboard shortcuts, scripting support, better performance, etc. I find myself wishing for those improvements 10x more than wishing for some "feature."
Those are features? You are describing features. You just don’t like that those kinds of features don’t bring in more revenue because they’re niche and often not dealbreakers when among people who care about them.
I agree they are, but this is framed in the context of the parent post which implied that experience improvements aren't really features that count.
And of course you're right, the reason almost no one builds polished experiences anymore is that, in most cases, it's not economical. Some developers (e.g. Things, Fantastical, Telegram, etc) make it work, but unfortunately it's very rare. I wish incentives were aligned differently, but I know they're not and I don't have a scalable solution; just have to hope enough developers decide to position themselves as the app with a good experience and make it work.
