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Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Knowing Apple, but not being able to see the video, one huge question comes to mind:

Will I be able to chat with my customers if they have an Android device or Windows?

Because in most industries today, if you can't interact with your customers with Android devices, you're cutting out half to 90% of your market. So that means that Business Chat is yet another thing that I need to implement twice over, one for Apple's walled garden, and once for the rest of the world (which is mostly Android, but could also include chats directly to customers browsing the store web page on Windows).

In which case why wouldn't I just use a cross-platform solution so I could integrate it just once?

Correct me if I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion here.

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I'm late here, but I work for a company (Zingle) that aggregates messaging platforms and presents a unified inbox to our customers.

These kinds of announcements are great for us because businesses will want to be reachable this way but will need to either juggle platforms or come to somebody like us who can provide a cross-channel solution out-of-the-box.

My 2 thoughts on the subject:

1. To an extent, it's a solution that can't be fully cross platform. Accessing messaging APIs is very limited on iOS and most apps that support a customer support feature really just use a single compose email view.

2. It's a matter of scale. Large companies can afford to spend the resources on a custom, more cross platform-y solution. Not so much with smaller ones, especially ones dedicated to iOS.

I really hope this is going to be an API. Businesses need to be available on every single platform, not buy a Mac so that they can serve maybe X % of their customers via some sort of proprietary solution.

> it's a solution that can't be fully cross platform.

I call B.S. on that. There's nothing stopping Apple from creating an API that anyone can register with, or even providing an XMPP gateway to allow completely non-Apple platforms to connect.

Apple is choosing to keep their walled garden isolated. It's absolutely a choice.

> Large companies can afford to spend the resources on a custom, more cross platform-y solution.

On scale: Cross platform is cheaper than coding twice. Small companies "dedicated to iOS" are Doing It Wrong. In 2017 it should be considered a best practice to use cross platform development environments for any app development. Between React Native, NativeScript, Xamarin, and yes, even Ionic/Cordova, there are a ton of great options, and there's no compelling reason for 95% of apps to go completely platform-native. And it's worse: Environments like React Native make it cheaper to create for a single platform, much less two platforms. And additional features and ongoing maintenance are also half as costly. It's a win-win-win situation.

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