[flyosity]

It's the norm to have to write applications for the platform you want to run them on. Nintendo 3DS, Playstation 3, Wii, Steam, Android, iOS, Windows... these are all different platforms. Write-once-run-anywhere is a myth and it seems that web developers deploying to one platform (the browser) still can't grok the idea of multi-platform development that desktop, mobile and game developers have understood for years.

You can't get the best experience for each platform if the tools and frameworks you use are dumbed down to accommodate the lowest common shared experience across everything.

[SomeCallMeTim]

I actually do my development in cross-platform native code. My currently library can target iOS, Android, and Windows, and I'd be able to add most other major platforms pretty trivially.

I agree that some UI changes are necessary between platforms as different as the PC, the Wii, and a touch-screen-based phone. But I very much disagree that you can't take advantage of solid cross-platform tools. I've written such tools, in fact.

Some native code to interface to native UI is necessary, but none of the native UI is really rocket science, and something offered natively on one phone can typically be done manually on another. Then it becomes an abstraction in the cross-platform library, and your code doesn't need to know how it's implemented.

But then again I'm a game developer, so I guess you've admitted that I could potentially already understand cross-platform development. ;)