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Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

I am quite baffled by all this. I heard of Famo.us, but didn't give it more than 1 thought. I thought it was just another framework, I would have never thought that they had employees, let alone that many and raising that much money.

I watched the video in the article, and I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that.

I feel like everything about Famo.us is all the wrong things that were described in the Reconsider article that was posted the other day https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f

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I think that essentially their pitch was that they would become the development platform for building apps. If they had considerably grown the number of apps on their platform, and gotten lots of positive developer buzz, they would have easily gotten more funding, even if they weren't making any money yet.

The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed. One of the biggest problems that I see that people underestimate is that most (not all, but most) great native mobile app engineers _don't_ want to build cross-platform apps. They tend to be "platform partisans", either loving Apple or Android, but not usually both. They always want to become experts in the latest and greatest platform technology. Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-platform technology either. If you want to be featured in the App or Play Stores, you've got to have a native app that uses the latest iOS or Android features.

I see lots and lots of cross-platform mobile solutions on HN, but I rarely see people considering the incentives of both Apple and Google, and the mobile developers, when it comes to evaluating these solutions.

> The problem, though, is that building a new platform is really, really, really hard, and they didn't succeed.

Yes. We bought into it and did a proof of concept app with Famous. We did get it to work, but it cost way too much effort, there were way too many bugs, and it ran on way too few browsers.

We decided to not use Famous again. The proof-of-concept app lingers around, it's still cool and we're hoping for a new chance if a community version of (in)famous becomes somewhat more mature.

The incentive for developers is that you don't write the same code twice.

Of course this applies to developers whose goal is to create software, as opposed to those whose goal is to bill hourly.

That's only an incentive for developers if they individually are writing the code for both platforms. Many (most?) shops where an app is the main product (or a very important piece of the main product) have separate iOS and Android dev teams.

(As I've developed for both platforms, I think I have some standing to say this)

Hold on, it's not that we don't want to build cross-platform apps, at least not universally. In my case, it's because I believe the contortions involved in abstracting out multiple wildly-divergent APIs built for different languages to a common system runtime necessarily lowers fidelity and quality for both.

"Write once run anywhere" ends up being a lot harder than "Learn once write anywhere" - I'm hopeful that React Native will demonstrate the success of this approach on mobile (even though, personally, I wish there were a non-JS option).

> Perhaps more importantly, Apple and Google aren't particularly interested in cross-platform technology either.

Ah, the problem with generalizations about large companies. http://flutter.io/, by Google.

The fact that flutter exists doesn't really change my view that I don't believe that Google is pushing it. Flutter to me seems much more of a "Hey, let's get some brilliant people at Google on a fun, hard project" than something Google sees as the future.

I agree, though, that Google has somewhat more of an incentive to build stuff cross platform than Apple does. Google wants you to access their services from any device, while Apple makes almost all their money from the devices themselves.

I think Android is also still a second class citizen when it comes to app development and if they can get some people who would have started with an iOS app to start with Flutter they might even the playing field.

Though that's probably not really worth that much since they're a close second, unlike everyone else.

It mostly sounds like they got sick of writing the same app twice internally though, which I could definitely see happening to people who just want to ship product and aren't platform partisans (it would be a bit weird to me for iOS partisans to go work at google?).

Flutter is in line with Google's business objectives. The more people transition to mobile apps, the more mobile searches people will make (as opposed to in-app searches.)

They don't care if you are on Android or on mobile web, so cannibalization here isn't an issue; both lead to Google searches.

I think you misunderstand how Google operates. Google is a huge company that, even though less bureaucratic than companies of the same size, has many layers of management. I'd be surprised if any top executives even know that Flutter exists. My point is, adevine is right, Flutter is probably a small internal project that a bunch of devs got behind and got approval from a middle manager to release. It indicates very little about what's on the mind of the real decision makers at Google (e.g. the VPs in charge of Android or mobile or search).

Now, it might get momentum and eventually get more attention and more resources from Google leadership; but it also might not.

3D GUIs are a lot like graphical programming. Just a giant black hole that has been sucking up research and investment money for 30 years without much to show.

You do get some neat demos, but not a lot else.

The game industry has been using 3D GUIs and graphical programming successfully for years. Graphical programming is also popular in some other fields (MaxMSP for audio visual, labview).

Add TouchDesigner to that list, which is basically MaxMSP for demoscene-style visual effects. It gets used for fancy things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zMI-qbmIPk

Which reinforces the point, 3D GUIs are a lot of fun but not very productive. In my workflow at my day job I want fewer GUI interactions and more production. AutoHotKey and 5 tonne overhead cranes help a lot, 3D GUIs not so much.

I won't discount the possibility that there will be some future problem that will be solved by a 3D GUI, perhaps astrogation.

I suspect the investment was made here because of the founder and not the idea/company. The founder's previous company (powerset) was sold to microsoft for 100m.

When it was first announced there was huge hype here on HN. I myself signed up. We were all really hoping that somebody had finally solved the cross-platform development pain. I was excited to see what the platform was going to do because at my company we really do feel the pain of developing for multiple platforms. So the investment isn't a surprise to me considering a CEO with a previous exit success and all the hype.

When they launched, though, it was just lackluster and had some major rendering bugs. It felt like the air got let out of the tires and everybody just moved on. So looking at it now, it's definitely difficult to see what all the hype was about.

I missed the first round of hype; was it originally all about 3D? Because that part definitely seemed crazy.

"I can't believe that people are throwing money at someone with a pitch like that".

I predicted they would not do good - easy to verify comment history.

Downvotes for a quote? Good job HN.

Relax. Downvotes are the air we breathe. Besides, a quote alone doesn't merit upvoting. Someone else said it.

thx for perspective, helped.

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