
Ask HN: Develop productivity app first for Mac or Windows 10? - johnmax
I want to create a productivity app, which runs in the background, and reminds me to work on my most important tasks, when it thinks that I am not. The goal is to create a Minimal Viable Product which I, and others, find useful.
Which of the two platforms has more potential customers? In other words: What is the market share of Mac vs Windows 10 among people who happily try out new productivity apps?
My coding skills: I am an experienced backend developer, but have not done a Mac or Windows 10 app yet. I like both OS.<p>1000 thanks for any thoughts or hints.
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slantyyz
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 tend to not buy as many.

When I was on Mac, I'd drop $10-15 on an app without blinking. For more
expensive apps on the App store, it was also an easy decision because a $50
app could be installed on multiple machines.

In general, the useful apps on Windows aren't on the App store don't have the
liberal licensing that Mac App store apps do. Because I want to run my stuff
on at least two machines (desktop and laptop), and because usually there's
some DRM that binds a license to one machine, I am much more hesitant about
buying licenses.

~~~
johnmax
Thanks a lot for your feedback - eventually, if it is successful, I would
launch it for all possible platforms.

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.

------
fbelzile
I run a bootstrapped desktop productivity software business myself. I'd say
the split is somewhere around 70% Windows and 30% Mac (all self-marketing, no
app stores). The mobile rush created a huge vacuum in the desktop market that
I think enabled people like me to succeed. Not to mention, you're not giving a
30% cut to Apple or Google and can generally charge more than a few dollars
for your app.

It's definitely easier for me to develop on Windows. Though, this is mainly
because XCode performance is atrocious on my mac mini and packaging apps for
outside the app store is pretty tedious. I still use a buggy tool that Apple
hides very deeply on their developer portal (it involves installing an ancient
version of XCode).

If you require a UI that is pretty heavy, here is my "secret" trick to save
time when developing for both Windows and macOS:

1) Buy a basic HTML template online for your app's dashboard.

2) Don't use Electon. Your users WILL notice and complain about performance.
Instead, use the native WebBrowser control in .NET for Windows and WebView
using macOS to display your UI. Disable right clicking and highlighting using
HTML/JS. To the user, it'll feel like any other native app. Add this meta tag
to the HTML file to ensure the WebBrowser control knows to use new versions of
IE to render the UI: <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">

3) Use the built in script calling functions to transfer settings back and
forth between the UI and main app in JSON. Do the back end stuff in native
code.

4) You can then re-use most of the UI code you wrote to easily port over to
macOS. Use the same functions and logic you wrote on Windows to make your
Swift functions.

Good luck!

~~~
baumandm
_Don 't use Electon. Your users WILL notice and complain about performance._

Is this actually true? Slack and Discord are valued at ~$7B and $2B
respectively, and neither have found it necessary to move off their Electron
apps. I assume both companies have already evaluated whether Electron's
performance impacts their their bottom line, and concluded it does not.

Electron is undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive than other options,
but outside of specific audiences (HN readers) I bet most people won't care.

~~~
nickjj
> Electron is undoubtedly slower and more resource-intensive than other
> options, but outside of specific audiences (HN readers) I bet most people
> won't care.

I think it makes even more of a difference for people outside of the HN
audience.

A non-technical person might grab a $400 laptop from Costco with 4gb of RAM
which is fairly common.

All it takes are a few Electron apps to exhaust that entire system's
resources.

~~~
anoncake
But will a non-technical person know which apps are to blame?

~~~
nickjj
They will be able to determine "before I installed this app everything was
good but now it's not" and then they will proceed to blame your app (with good
reason).

------
softwaredoug
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.

~~~
johnmax
Yes, I totally agree, I would first build it for me and work with it.

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.

------
dmos62
Let me step back a tad and comment on your use case, i.e. needing to be
reminded to work and not procrastinate. I largely solved this problem by
adopting the Pomodoro technique. Following it, I subdivide my work time into
periods of concentrated work (20mn in my case) and relaxation (3-5mn). This
increases my effective work stamina very much, helps with motivation, and has
other benefits. Related literature is plentiful.

------
enjikaka
Make a PWA and you cover Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android in one go.

~~~
jjp
Not sure that a PWA would have the scope of insight to know when you are
skipping off the important task, e.g. playing solitaire vs coding, reading HN
vs testing your app?

------
morpheuskafka
If it needs native integration, use Electron, if not use a Progressive Web
App. If it's got to be native go to macOS. The App Store ecosystem makes it
way easier to make sales, and there is an expectation of buying quality apps.
If you go the Mac route your design needs to be excellent though.

~~~
un-devmox
I'm not that familiar with PWA's, but how do you monetize them if they are not
downloaded from the app store?

------
nickjj
I'd be careful about creating these types of apps because a lot of people
(especially developers) value privacy.

What your describing is monitoring everything I do on my computer and then
likely transmit it to your site. Even if it didn't transmit anything I would
still be reluctant to use it unless it were open source.

To detect whether or not you're working on what you're supposed to be working
on, you'll probably end up recording what window is focused every few seconds
right? You might want to hack together an auto hotkey script (Windows) to do
this. With a bit of AHK knowledge you could probably write a prototype in a
day.

~~~
johnmax
Wow, AutoHotkey looks cool - maybe it is nice for doing a first prototype.

Yes, I would check the focused windows, but also would take screenshots to
evaluate (with OCR/NLP) whether the email you are writing really relates to
your todos.

I would not store those data, neither locally, nor transmit them to my
servers, as I am very concerned about security (if my servers get hacked, then
I don't want to have anything sensitive on them).

~~~
ekovarski
Privacy issues aside, re: screenshots, that sounds like a lot of work for a
MVP esp when most people are quite happy with a better pommodore or similar
solutions.

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darreld
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.

~~~
johnmax
Thanks a lot for the numbers.

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?

------
bronak1
you can do both with [https://electronjs.org/](https://electronjs.org/)

~~~
deca6cda37d0
and here comes the discussion about why electron is bad :P

~~~
neospice
In a world where VSCode runs on electron is there even room for this
discussion anymore?

~~~
sirjaz
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/](http://avaloniaui.net/)

~~~
rygxqpbsngav
Looks like Avalon is in beta. Are there any stable alternatives that are
production ready?

------
pjc50
Obvious dependencies: you need a computer of the relevant type if you're going
to go native.

Are you going to sell it as a product? How? Mac store, Windows store, online
from your own website, Steam, something else?

How are you going to acquire customers?

What apps are you competing with (hint: there's a lot, on all platforms)?

Which native platform are you most familiar with/want to become familiar with?
(Note that Windows has several platforms within it; UWP is the obvious modern
choice, but maybe you want a WinForms app)

------
pengo
From my own experience I'd consider a development environment that lets you
cross-compile. c or c++ work and, old hat though it is, I've had good success
writing cross-platform utilities in Lazarus (Object Pascal) and compiling for
MacOS, Linux and Windows. The only issues in all cases has been the need for
platform-specific libraries to manage GUI components like rich text editing.

------
leowoo91
You have to study your decision depending on your
audience/budget/vision/tools, there is really no specific answer to that. Also
remember, even cross-platform development has its own disadvantages, and worst
decision is at least a "mile" ahead, rather than spending too much time on
best solution.

------
fredley
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.

~~~
slantyyz
> I wouldn't rely on anecdata from HN posters, who may or may not be
> representative of your potential market.

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.

------
douglaswlance
Web first. It's cheaper, more people can use it, and you can find product-
market fit more efficiently.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
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?

~~~
mushufasa
any solution that I could think of could also be called malware...

------
robjan
The market is quite saturated but people in the Apple ecosystem tend to be
more likely to pay for apps.

------
hodder
Who is the obvious target market in your mind? Is it programmers, artists,
musicians, small business people, mega corporate conglomerate employees,
millenials, boomers, rich people, North Americans, Europeans, Chinese? The
answers to these questions will guide you.

------
bluedino
Simple, the Mac. Huge bonus of being able to have it on the App Store and sell
it for a couple bucks.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
The App Store is awash with productivity stuff, I'm not sure it's as big a
bonus as you think.

~~~
slantyyz
If I were building a Mac App store app, I wouldn't rely on the App store for
discovery. On the other hand, the App Store is easier for handling downloads,
updates, purchase transactions and licensing.

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.

