Developers should really not be allowed to talk ROI.
Read the comments on this article. Once you start getting in, every 4th or 5th is someone saying that the effort of supporting it has to outweigh the effort of developing it and that it isn't going to happen because the Windows Phone market is too small and that they should instead invest efforts on new features on larger platforms.
Who sees the problem?
You can't complain about support costs AND complain that the market is too small. The two are incompatible. If your user base is too small you will see 0 or as near to 0 as matter support issues. You'll only receive an influx of support issues if there is a sufficient influx of users.
Conversely, releasing new code on a bigger platform means potentially destabilizing the product with a bigger audience which means that for the same amount of effort you're actually likely to generate more in support costs for an app on iOS or Android than on Windows Phone.
Furthermore, if you're talking about porting an existing code, most of the code is reusable out of the box and should be as bug free (or bug riddled) on Windows Phone as it is on the Platform it came from. This isn't likely to be 100% true. Some API's are rerouted to Windows API's and there is always the chance something didn't get compiled down exactly as expected. But, those are Microsoft's problems and not yours. Wait it out a bit first and let some others find the kinks for Microsoft.
And that is the ROI problem for software in a nutshell. As your product and customer base grows your support effort for a "unit" of work grows as well. Smaller apps have fewer places for things to go wrong which makes it quicker and easier to find things, and smaller groups of users means fewer people hitting the code hard enough to find bugs and fewer duplicate support items.
You can't assume that there are no users on the platform and still assume that you will also subsequently be flooded by an unmanageable amount of support work.
Frankly, if that is the best argument you have. You are definitely in that group that should keep their mouths shut.
Who sees the problem?
You can't complain about support costs AND complain that the market is too small. The two are incompatible. If your user base is too small you will see 0 or as near to 0 as matter support issues. You'll only receive an influx of support issues if there is a sufficient influx of users.
Conversely, releasing new code on a bigger platform means potentially destabilizing the product with a bigger audience which means that for the same amount of effort you're actually likely to generate more in support costs for an app on iOS or Android than on Windows Phone.
Furthermore, if you're talking about porting an existing code, most of the code is reusable out of the box and should be as bug free (or bug riddled) on Windows Phone as it is on the Platform it came from. This isn't likely to be 100% true. Some API's are rerouted to Windows API's and there is always the chance something didn't get compiled down exactly as expected. But, those are Microsoft's problems and not yours. Wait it out a bit first and let some others find the kinks for Microsoft.
And that is the ROI problem for software in a nutshell. As your product and customer base grows your support effort for a "unit" of work grows as well. Smaller apps have fewer places for things to go wrong which makes it quicker and easier to find things, and smaller groups of users means fewer people hitting the code hard enough to find bugs and fewer duplicate support items.
You can't assume that there are no users on the platform and still assume that you will also subsequently be flooded by an unmanageable amount of support work.
Frankly, if that is the best argument you have. You are definitely in that group that should keep their mouths shut.
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