Comment by toast0
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.
That's great for developers, but how does that help users? As a user, I would rather use something built specifically for the device (and os) I'm using, I've used enough things that were supposed to work everywhere that it's a major turn off at this point.
If developers want to share code cross platform, really, the way to do it is write a shared core logic (probably in C, because that is available everywhere), and then write the UI from scratch everywhere, conforming to the platform guidelines (unless it's a media player). It's more work than hoping a write once run eveywhere will work well, but it delivers a much better result.
>but how does that help users?
It helps users by providing apps.
Purism phone is very niche product. It is unreasonable to think that a lot of developers will start writing their application for PureOS. But hopefully some of them can port app if it will be easy enough. So instead of OS without almost any apps you will have OS with some apps.
As a user, is there a significant difference between an OS with no apps and an os with mostly half-hearted ports of apps?
Having been a user of Windows Phone, I would say, don't bother giving me an app if it's going to be garbage.