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Comment by srg0 | Hacker News Reader

iPhone-only social app = public beta, in terms of maturity.

Unless it supports all three mobile platforms or has published a full-featured API (or protocol specs) from day 1, any proprietary communication app is a non-starter for me (Hangouts included).

How one is supposed to promote it over WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, and the likes? Hey, this new cool app does almost the same thing, but it's not available to the majority of your contacts!

In the real world, popular apps may be walled gardens, but they are cross-platform. Whatsapp supports 7 mobile platforms, Skype supports 6 platforms (5 mobile), LINE supports 9 platforms (6 mobile), Viber supports 8 platforms (6 mobile), WeChat supports 12 platforms (9 mobile variants), Telegram supports 7 platforms (3 mobile), Kik supports 3 mobile platforms, even Google Hangouts supports 2 mobile platforms. How an iPhone-only app can be considered seriously?

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I disagree. For startups it's usually more important to focus their resources than to support everything. http://blog.semilshah.com/2014/08/25/ios-first-android-much-...

For startups it's more important to deliver what they promise. For a startup which boasts to replace telephony, it is about being available to everyone with a phone. iPhone first strategy may have worked for Instagram (an app for phones with a better camera). But times change, smartphones are getting cheaper, iOS is loosing market share, messengers is a crowded business.

What a joke, I hate those biased generalized articles.

> 1. Early-stage startup teams cannot afford to handle the hardware fragmentation that plagues Android.

You have a full stack of iOS devices, too, maybe even more expensive. It's a point if you develop quite near hardware features or want to do pixel-perfect designs without auto-layout, but that's difficult for iOS, too, these days. A messenger app is really not that device specific.

> 2. Study after study demonstrates iOS users are not only growing in key geographies, but are more valuable customers.

If it's about hype and money, you might be right, but if you just need users with a much more social diversity, Android is likely on your side.

> 3. iPhone 5c and future low cost models will likely steal share from Android relative to yesterday. Dunno. You say "likely", too, so why is that even considered as a top 3 argument?

Nevertheless, the most important point here is: It's a messenger. For teams. You don't want split between iOS and Android devices and Talko itself sees this as negative point:

> (The corporate beta testers I spoke with sighed wistfully when reporting that a couple of team members could not participate because they didn’t use iPhones.) “We can’t build a business on this until we have all of the above,” says Ozzie, who wanted to make sure his engineers aced the iPhone first; [...]

iMessage's strength is its SMS fallback (still, who wants to send expensive text messages these days), but Facebook, WhatsApp etc. are generally much more used.

Want to say two things to you.

1) Absolutely agree.

2) Extra marks for totting up those cross-platform stats. My opinion of Viber went up (even though I'm an open-source head) when I saw that they have a Linux desktop client. Same goes for Skype back in the day.

Did you read the article? They are already working on supporting other platforms. It IS a "public beta", like you said.

I, as an Android user, don't like feeling like a second-class citizen. Make it cross-platform from the get go I say.

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