Comment by masklinn
7 years ago
> It solves a _development_ problem, in that it reduces the amount of work needed to allow an application to reach a larger number of devices.
Sounds like a repeat of the Java strategy: you can run garbage nobody wants anywhere nobody wants to run it.
> So because someone else failed at solving a particular problem in a particular way previously
Microsoft also attempted it, and also failed quite miserably.
> we should simply give up on it?
Not necessarily, but at the very least you could avoid lying by omission (mentioning Google and Apple which don't exactly attempt convergence and pointedly ignoring every pre-existing attempt at the concept) and maybe consider humility and avoid overblown claims given you're not the first to attempt it, nobody's succeeded, there's no evidence available that you are succeeding, and you've really not shown anything which would made anyone think "this is going to succeed where everybody else failed".
Microsoft failed in a completely different way: their entire mobile platform failed. I'm not sure it had anything to with UWP specifically, and as far as we know that had little to do with it. But regardless of the reason, I still don't think that should prevent others from trying to solve the problem in different ways.
I think the failure of Windows Mobile 10 could be attributed to UWP in that Microsoft applied it internally, there was no separate Mobile team like with the previous releases of Windows Phone, and as a result, the released OS did not run well on mobile devices until about a year after release. That's what experience has taught me to expect from write once, run everywhere.