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Earlier quoted context omitted.
and here comes the discussion about why electron is bad :P
In a world where VSCode runs on electron is there even room for this discussion anymore?
Simple, the Mac. Huge bonus of being able to have it on the App Store and sell it for a couple bucks.
The App Store is awash with productivity stuff, I'm not sure it's as big a bonus as you think.
If you are doing a Mac App and want people to try your app, it would probably be worth spending the several thousands of dollars it takes to get a sponsored post on a site like Daring Fireball.
I'm an ex-Mac user, and current Windows user. I'd say do Mac first. Mac users are accustomed to and way more likely to pay for apps. Also, people are way more accustomed to buying apps on the Mac App Store than the Windows App Store, so discovery is definitely going to be an issue if you're going the App Store route. On the Windows side, I pay for apps, but because prices tend to be higher for useful Windows apps, I…
So, getting to paying users is not a priority for me at the beginning.
Getting to heavy users definitely is, and discoverability may be better on the Apple App Store I guess, though eventually I would like the product to be so good, that it also gets word-of-mouth attention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a world where VSCode runs on electron is there even room for this discussion anymore?
VSCode is highly optimized and has tons of engineers behind it. If it were me I would do .Net Core and Avalon UI: http://avaloniaui.net/
I would say whichever platform YOU use day to day. You won’t know if it’s useful unless you are constantly using and refining it. Id also be careful conflating “I want to build a product” with “I want to build a tool for me”. Start with just a tool for you, decide later after it’s useful to a user population of 1 if it’s valuable to invest in finding a market for.
Right now I use a Mac, but I have used also Windows in the past, and - if I decided to code in Windows - then would switch all my work to a Windows machine, too.
Everything I do is pretty portable between those two platforms, so I don't have any problems with switching between the two.
Web first. It's cheaper, more people can use it, and you can find product-market fit more efficiently.
How are you going to get a web app to run in the background and notify you when it sees you are reading HN instead of churning out code?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and here comes the discussion about why electron is bad :P
In a world where VSCode runs on electron is there even room for this discussion anymore?
Opening a 1.5mb markdown file with VSCode idles an i5 3.2ghz quad core at 50%+ CPU and uses 800mb of RAM with only a few extensions loaded.
Also the input latency while typing in an empty file with no extensions is substantially higher than apps using other UI frameworks.
I think there's plenty of room for discussion, especially considering that VSCode is over the top optimized compared to most other Electron apps (which are WAY WAY worse than VSCode).
Make a PWA and you cover Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android in one go.
I wouldn't rely on anecdata from HN posters, who may or may not be representative of your potential market. Try and gather some data and see what it says, e.g. spend $5 on some facebook ads for your not-yet-existant product, and see the breakdown of OS's that hit your landing page.
Well, if the OP gets 100 actual responses (as opposed to secondary discussion posts), then that anecdata actually is data.
Given:
* the nature of the described app
* that its functionality appears to be scratching an itch the OP has
* that the OP is a member here
* the OP asking the question here
..it doesn't seem to be far fetched to think that the posters here are at least somewhat representative of the potential market.
Windows has the most market share at ~85% total (Windows 10 is ~54%). If your target is enterprise users, then probably it's Windows but Mac users have been thought of as more willing to spend money on indie software they use.
Do you have any view on whether those percentages still hold, if you only look at (e.g.) startup employees or freelancers or other customer groups, which may probably like such productivity apps?