[scarface74]

Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market.

So they could afford a Mac and internet access, but they couldn't afford the extra $74?

As far as excluding people and organizations that want to use a single codebase - good. If they didn't want to take the time to customize their apps enough to make it work on my platform of choice, it's not an app I wanted anyway.

My takeaway from this is that you've not met a lot of developers outside the U.S. or who have ethical concerns about mandatory hardware / software purchases as prerequisite to market access.

And the market is at work - they chose not to take the time to make an app optimized for my platform of choice, and I'm not stuck with an app that isn't optimized for my platform of choice.

[masklinn]

> So they could afford a Mac and internet access, but they couldn't afford the extra $74?

An old mac should be pretty cheap (the latest xcode runs on pre-2010 macs, even more so as they can be upgraded by hand — to a point) and if you're in SEA or eastern europe your internet connection is not $150/mo comcast. For instance in Romania high-speed internet is $15, but the average net income is $650~700 and minimum wage is ~200.

[wpietri]

And I'd add that requiring a Mac is another unnecessary barrier to access. Things like Fog Creek's Glitch IDE are making it clear that it's possible to build things from any device with a browser.

[nkristoffersen]

And don't forget expo.io build process. I never have to open xcode anymore.

[wpietri]

Well that's really cool. How is React Native coming along? I see it's still pre-1.0, but given that they've been going 3 years, I assume there's been a lot of progress.

[ascorbic]

Just a few billion users. I think they're doing ok.

[zamber]

Consider all *nix tools one uses on a Mac. Consider the hack which git on Windows is.

VS Code is an example of an universal, well-optimized app. Slack on the other hand...

Stuff like this is driven by diluted business decisions. Inferring from it that probably one would not use the app eitherways is borderline Linux-like fanatism fueled by self-delusion.