Cross platform development by Apple, Google, and Microsoft analyzed and visualized
Jan Dawson / Beyond Devices : Tweets: @benjaminellis , @chrisnahr , @animeshsriv and @stevesi Tweets: Benjamin Ellis / @benjaminellis : The land-locked, isolated Apple island > @codepo8: Visualizing cross-platform development http://www.beyonddevic.es/... Christoph Nahr / @chrisnahr : In consumer apps, Windows has become “the platform only a mother could love” http://www.beyonddevic.es/... Animesh Srivastava / @animeshsriv : Apple's exclusivity; Google's services pervasiveness; Microsoft, me too in services; and interest in Windows mobile http://www.beyonddevic.es/... Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Cross-platform apps: need to account for depth, quality, timing, integration, perf. Existence needed not sufficient. http://www.beyonddevic.es/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Jan Dawson's visualization lands amid a cluster of commentary on the same question: Benjamin Ellis frames Apple as a land-locked 'island,' Christoph Nahr calls Windows 'the platform only a mother could love' for consumer apps, and Animesh Srivastava sorts the three vendors into exclusive (Apple), pervasively cross-platform (Google), and trailing 'me too' (Microsoft). Steven Sinofsky raises the bar underneath all of it — apps must deliver depth, quality, timing, integration, and performance, not mere existence.
First-order effects
- Microsoft comes out of the piece with the weakest developer pitch: its services are characterized as reactive and its mobile interest thin, while Apple's exclusivity is quantified as an island rather than defended.
- For developers allocating effort across the three ecosystems, the chart forces a portfolio choice between Google-style reach and Apple-style depth, with Sinofsky's five-part quality bar as the filter for whether a cross-platform port is worth shipping at all.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's answer over the following years is not better cross-platform services but a coherent hardware lineup of its own — the pivot visible when its later event showed an appealing PC, desktop, and tablet slate precisely as critics said Apple was dropping the ball.
- Apple's island posture puts pressure on the other two to compete on integration inside their own walls, which is why Google's services pervasiveness reads in the commentary as a deliberate counter-strategy rather than an accident.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward platforms lowering their own walls selectively: Apple later shipped shared architecture that lets Macs with Apple-designed chips run iOS apps natively, and its Mac Catalyst experience shows simple ports work while complicated ones struggle — openness arriving as engineered tooling, not philosophy.
- If exclusivity-plus-controlled-distribution keeps winning, the curated app store model Apple built gets re-litigated against its own history, exactly the frame analysts later used when examining the App Store debate through the lens of Windows.
The trend: Platform strategy is converging on walled gardens whose walls are lowered deliberately and asymmetrically — exclusivity as the default, interoperability as a tool each vendor deploys only where it strengthens the core ecosystem.