[gpdpocketer]

I've been using a cross-platform GUI framework/engine to do app development on all the platforms: Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android - and it has been a joy to deploy one app on all of these systems.

One of the reasons this has been so feasible has been the fact that the engine (MOAI) uses GL ES to manage the framebuffer itself - giving the same look and feel on all platforms the host runs. This has been, honestly, revolutionary in terms of building a single app that runs everywhere.

This now becomes more complicated because the engine has to be modified for Apple platforms to use Metal, and represents another fork/splinter in the unity of the host itself.

I wonder if their decision to use a non-standard graphics API is due to them wanting to make this style of development a lot more difficult in the future - i.e. are Apple passively antagonizing the cross-platform framework builders in order to establish an outlier condition for their platforms? The cynic in me says yes, of course this is what they are doing ..