I know how Xojo started. But if someone intends to sell a tool for developers, selling a great tool where there are plenty of developers is the best way of doing it. I don’t care fishing in a sea full of fishes with 1000 other fishers if I use a great bait, fishing in a pond containing 1 fish, with 2 other fishers, sometimes is not an advantage.
I’m currently moving all my tooling to a Dell (using it right now). Because 99% of my desktop users uses Windows and I need to see what they see.
My point is even if Xojo dropped x-platform compiles, android, web and even iOS what other tools are there in the macOS world ?
Xcode is about it. Maybe there’s another I dont know of ?
So they just dont have a lot of competition even in that severely restricted space and they could be a big fish in that small pond.
Not so in the Windows world so they’d HAVE to be commensurately better or different IF they chased that bigger market only.
I’m not suggesting they should do this and focus only on macOS
I still think they have a decent market even if all they did was focused on desktop cross platform and do that exceedingly well across all the desktops.
Attempting to be the “do everything for every target” doesn’t seem to be serving them very well.
They’re almost illustrative of the saying “Jack of all trades. Master of none”
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Never been on mac, but used linux a lot.
Now I’m mostly on Windows, and in search for the right toolbox.
C# on .NET Core looks realy interesting to me, and I’m considering it as my major tool : Winforms or WPF apps for windows, Blazor webapp (soon) delivered as PWA as pure Wasm… most of my potential targets would be covered. Even server scripting could be done cross platform with .Net Core!
For Android where PWAs won’t work maybe flutter could work… or I would target Xamarin with C# again. [EDIT : i mean it works technically, but sometimes it won’t work for certain uses cases, due to the peculiar way of installing the apps]
So yes, I had interest for Xojo Android target, but I lost it. And I’m prety sure I lost the money I paid to Xojo a few months ago as, even if they release Web2 and Android within a year, i’ll have difficulties to trust them.
Why would PWAs not work for android? Not picking up a fight, honest curiosity 
No technical reason, but mostly marketing ones: PWAs can not be delivered through the Play store. Installation is easy, but most users don’t know about it yet.
Not the same experience, and sometimes it matters a lot.
Distribution through the play store isnt required though is it ?
Its not like iOS where side loading is a pain for the average user
Ahhhh OK, that makes sense. Although the fact that not having to install the app is part of the benefits of a PWA, specially for users with limited space in their mobile devices.
I sepent quit a bit of time exploring options for developing mobile apps, I looked into Flutter and it certainly looks interesting. In my case I decided to go with a Hybrid app for something I will be needing in the near future, Cordova/Capacitor JS is what I finally opted for.
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Agreed 100%. Personally, I’d just be happy if they nailed macOS (both desktop and Console) and Linux (again for Console).
Interesting! We never stop learning.
https://medium.com/@firt/google-play-store-now-open-for-progressive-web-apps-ec6f3c6ff3cc
Thank you @Rick.A & @HMARROQUINC, it’s interesting and I’m just discovering it with your posts. I’ll look into this.
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