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The fact is, only very rarely are you in a team of 2-3 devs and you need to support ALL of these platforms. If that’s the case for a small startup, serious strategic errors and lack of focus is being made by the founders!

Even Instagram didn’t even have an Android app until they were acquired, and then it still took them another couple of years to support web. Their focus was their success.

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To be fair, Instagram didn’t have an Android app a long while ago. The Android market & demographic has changed a lot since, with high-end Android phones sporting great screens, cameras and costing nearly as much as the iPhone.

An Instagram launching today would see much greater pressure to be on Android sooner rather than later.

That’s true, and a good point that I should take into account when confronted with this decision in future.

Depends on what you're building. But sure, if you can remove the "cross-platform" spec. and say just build a desktop app on Linux, use whatever suits your boat.

Personally, I find it amazing to have one engineer builds a feature end-to-end from the server to the web/mobile devices by using the same language and re-using 90% of the code across all the clients.

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