do you build cross-platform from day 1, or deal with it once people ask?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately and curious how the rest of you handle it..
forexample, you ship your app on one platform — say mac, or web, or just windows — it gets some traction, and then the requests start rolling in: “any linux version?” “when windows??” “pls make it work on X” 😅
so my question is basically: do you plan for cross-platform from the very start, or not?
a few angles i keep going back and forth on:
do you pick a cross-platform stack (electron, tauri, flutter, rn, whatever) from day 1 just in case, even if it slows you down early?
or do you go fully native on one OS first, ship fast, and only think about porting once there’s real demand?
for those who retrofitted later — how painful was it actually? worth the wait, or do you wish you’d designed for it upfront?
my gut says building for everything before you have users is premature, but retrofitting sounds like a nightmare too. so theres no clean answer imo
how do yall approach this? do you even think about other OSes when you start, or is it a “future me problem” 😄
Replies
@gfazioli From a small team perspective, supporting everything early sounds exhausting. i would rather have one product that works really well than 3 versions that are all slightly frustrating.
Netfox
@paisley_coleman good point 👍 thx
@gfazioli My choice would probably depend on how closely the product interacts with the operating system. If it needs deep native features, i would think about this much earlier. If it does not, I would be much more relaxed about waiting.