[lewisl9029]

I don't see why any reasonable developer would choose building the same app on multiple platforms over building it once on a standardized platform and having it just work everywhere.

That is, of course, if the standardized platform had all the capabilities and great UX of the proprietary platforms. This is where the web often falls short, and the companies behind proprietary platforms have some very sweet incentives to keep it that way, i.e. developer lock-in and maintaining complete control over the platform's direction.

Despite all the impediments, I still firmly believe an open platform will triumph eventually, because developers love efficiency, and the current landscape of wasting work on rebuilding for proprietary platforms is anything but efficient.

[jacobolus]

> I don't see why any reasonable developer would choose building the same app on multiple platforms over building it once on a standardized platform and having it just work everywhere.

Platforms have different characteristics: different input methods, different display sizes, different common use cases, different interface conventions and standards, different conventions for connection to online platforms, ...

If you’re making a self-contained game for iOS and Android (for example) then sure, something identical across platforms is better. In the case of a general “app”, you’ll get a better result if you design the interface from first principles on each platform.

[lewisl9029]

Yes, platforms have different characteristics, but there's no reason why any of these characteristics can't eventually be abstracted behind a standardized API that allows developers to interact with it in the same way across all platforms.

I should have been more specific in my original post. I'm not advocating that a smartwatch interface should be built on the codebase as that of the phone interface. Rather that a smartwatch interface for an app on iWatchOS (I'm actually not sure what the official name is) should be built from the same codebase as a smartwatch interface for an app on Android Wear, with platform capability or design convention differences handled on a case by case basis as exceptions rather than the rule, ideally abstracted away by the standardized APIs themselves or frameworks built on top of these APIs (the Ionic Framework is an example of something that does this extremely well for smartphone development that's built on top of open standards).

At the end of the day, user interfaces for hardware of the same form factor generally share more than they differ regardless of what software platform they're on. The fact that code sharing ratio across platforms in the typical native app development process does not reflect this indicates that there's room for improvement.

The web is not ready to completely replace proprietary platforms yet, but I'm willing to bet my career on the hope that eventually, it, or some other standardized platform, will be. I wouldn't want to work as an app developer in a future where this isn't the case anyways.

[sukilot]

My toaster needs a different UI from my phone. My phone doesn't need a different UI from my other phone.