Daring Fireball: “The whole point of Apple’s success with iOS has been the opposite of “write once, run anywhere”. It’s more like “write a version that is specifically optimized for this particular device”.”
This is one of the things I love about Apple. A lot of companies would be fine with slapping some simple mouse based helpers into their emulator, change it ever so slightly so it works on the desktop, and ship it. Apple doesn’t do that. They tune their software for the hardware platform. As it should be.
“Write once, run anywhere” always led to crappy GUIs. I won’t mourn its passing. [Exceptions to the rule (Firefox/Chrome) do a _lot_ of work per platform to make them good platform citizens, and even then you've got people who crib that 'xx works better on yy platform.']
It’s not a coincidence that desktop Java and Flash are on the backfoot now.