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Comment by stock_toaster | Hacker News Reader

> requiring two separate teams of platform developers for every feature we needed to implement

So your margins are more important than your users’ native experiences. Got it.

I mean looking at this I can see why people came to the conclusion that this was primarily a move that VC funding caused even though AgileBits seem to vehemently deny this.

The funny thing is, they were doing just fine for years with just their own money. Now that they have sooo much more money, they suddenly can't afford separate developers for different platforms... they should be able to hire 10x more people now.

The primary issue with having two separate teams for the same platform was not money, it was time. To be clear: we wanted to build a native app in parallel with our cross-platform Electron solution, and we had the developers to do it. But unfortunately, having an additional team that needed to implement the UI for every single new feature was a significant slow-down, and we collectively realized that we could not meet our deadlines nor maintain this long term.

I'm sorry for not being more clear earlier as to why we couldn't support two separate teams for the same platform. Hopefully this clears up any confusion.

I don’t understand why two teams means slower. Are you keeping the total number of engineers the same? If you are saying 2x engineers on electron complete tasks faster than 1x on electron and 1x on native, you are basically agreeing with OPs take.

You take money to provide software. But then you become lazy and greedy and want 1 size fits all. End result is your users having clunky, high latency experience.

I think he’s saying 1x on both Electron and Swift UI was making it too hard to ship either version to an acceptable standard because each was slowing the other down due to inconsistencies, difficulty staying in parity and double communication.

Unfortunately, it’s normal in software development for multiple platforms to increase development complexity when feature and UX parity is prioritized.

Your deadlines are irrelevant to us. We want native UI

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