drachen23
New member
No the app gap will not close because the startup mobile developers target iOS exclusive 80% of the time, Android the other 20%. Windows OSes are literally frozen out for various reasons(poor APIs, low user base, hatred towards MS).
This is fairly on-track. iOS gets all the best new apps because its user base has all the early-adopters and cool-kids. Android has numbers, but they don't include the movers and shakers. When my workplace (a major cultural institution) builds out apps, they tend to be for iOS only with Android as a "phase II" if ever. Our core audience is iPhone users with a tiny minority of Android users. Windows Phone isn't on our radar. I love WP as a platform and I enjoy writing apps for it, but it doesn't make sense for us to spend time and money on a Windows Phone app that next to nobody will use. I don't think WP fans appreciate that there's a big app gap between iOS and Android too.
Those mentioning Universal apps are way off base. Windows 8 has had worse dev adoption than Windows Phone in terms of apps and if anything the Universal apps were trying to get WP devs onto Windows rather than the other way around. MS seems to be on the right track partnering with Xamarin that makes cross-platform apps easier. If you can make it so that it's just as easy to make an iPhone/Android/WP app as an iPhone/Android app, WP can only benefit from that. If I ran MS, I'd snap up Xamarin (and maybe Unity) and put as much MS financial and tech muscle as I could behind it even if it meant releasing Visual Studio 2015 on the Mac or even Linux as well as Windows. The only way WP is going to get the top apps is that it is effortless for devs and the people who pay them to make apps for all platforms at the same time. Devs want that too. When Xamarin did their presentation at the last //Build conference, they had to move to the main hall because so many wanted to attend.
Until it becomes trivial to build apps for all three platforms, WP is going to stay a distant third in the app race.