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Comment by somenewaccount1 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like you are still working on learning distribution. I'm typing on a mac, but own an android. i still can't use or try your app :(

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At least for this particular flavor of app, building an Android version is an optimization that should be made once the product has been proven successful.

Until that happens, it would be a huge waste of time and money for the developer to build an Android version, since it too would fail as a product, just like the iOS version.

Multiplying 0 by 2 is still 0.

The situation might be different for an app whose success depended on the user's ability to use the app to communicate with all of their friends, some of which had Android phones.

than i guess it wasn't actually a lesson worth learning, although it was in his list of eight. ::shrugs::

Why not build something like this cross-platform? The functionality sounds simple enough that you don't really need a native app for each platform.

It seems like it would be simple enough, but it's death by a thousand cuts. Supporting Android means having to keep track of even more screen sizes, OS versions, updates, app store releases and so on. It just adds on more and more. For one developer who is trying to prove out an idea, the work to support the app on multiple platforms just eats up your time and focus when you really should be focusing on features and adjusting what the product is as you get more info from your existing customers.

There are of course frameworks out there to help you build one codebase for multiple platforms, but if you go down that route, if you aren't familiar with the framework, you have to learn it. There are going to be quirks in them that you're not aware of. Maybe framework version X only works with iOS version Y and Android version Z. It just goes on and on. Frameworks aren't perfect either, and things don't work exactly the same across platforms even with the framework.

Yes exactly, having the same app and features on android would still have leave to all users churning like they did on iOS.

Think Clubhouse only moving to android when it was working on iOS.

Even when using about cross-platform frameworks, there's quirks, store pages and time to invest to maintain the other platform. My Flutter app is still not available on iOS for example.

I thought failing on 1 platform would be more economical than failing on 2 :)

For mobile apps, if you're a single developer, I think going with a single platform is fine. You can only do so much, and if you're familiar with the platform, you can move much more quickly than having to support two. That's the strategy I've chosen and it's helped a lot because I was already an expert in iOS and a lot of the work is just "figuring out what users want" and it's easier to change your code on a single platform that you know really well.

Then.....extending distribution wasn't really a problem or lesson learned. It's a nice to have.

Yes, no point in more distribution when users were not retaining. Although, it was hard to even get those first few thousand users to try the product.

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