[thirdreplicator]

Given all the grief expressed in the post and the comments, it seems like if someone architected a really nice, developer-friendly native mobile API for any platform you would get droves of devs flocking to it.... Despite the two major players, the market seems wide open as long as they focused on the development experience like what Matz did for Ruby... Programmers are customers too! :)

[JamesBarney]

I've heard a lot of praise for the Windows phone developer experience, but what really matters is the audience. Dev's flock to the audience. Even just a small pay difference will dev's to deal with the most terrible of developer experiences(ex. Sharepoint)

[pjmlp]

I do hobby coding between Android and WP, and do love the experience.

Microsoft might have lost the mobile war, but they are on good track to win the hybrid laptops one.

[andromeduck]

Well it's good as long as you're okay with being on Windows but that can be a pretty big barrier

[naiyt]

React Native is getting there. It's still early software with a lot of problems but it has a lot of promise. My anecdotal experience as someone learning mobile development was that React Native was a lot easier to pick up and learn than native Android development. Despite a large number of issues the developer experience has been really slick and I've been able to iterate much faster.

Give it a couple of years and I think it'll be exactly what you're asking for.

[lacker]

it has a lot of promise

Glad to hear it ;-) I'm curious, what have been the main issues for you?

[pitaj]

Probably the fact that it's still in active development, so there are breaking changes.

[pier25]

Also the terrible docs

[lacker]

I'm interested in improving these docs. Can you point to one area that you think is particularly terrible?