It looks like that took very poor decisions such as bad frameworks and in-house made libraries vs what was already existing. First, it's not true that there's

It looks like that took very poor decisions such as bad frameworks and in-house made libraries vs what was already existing. First, it's not true that there's no C++ mobile community. There are plenty of forums, blog posts, projects, using C++ in mobile field. Xamarin and Qt are helping C++ Devs go mobile since years. Second, it depends on which standard they've used. It looks like they choose a pre-C++11 standard, making things more complicated (in 2013 there were already full C++11 compliant compilers, even for mobile), especially threads. They probably forgot that Boost itself has modules for JSON, checks for non null objects and so on. Third, they probably kicked off the project with some average C++ developers and they left. They haven't found cheap experts (compared to Kotlin/Swift, which are really cheaper) and didn't want to pay high salaries. The story that those Kotlin/Swift developers didn't want to learn C++ says a lot of the quality of those developers as well. Sure, it's matter of interest, but it was also a great opportunity to earn much more money as well. As for build systems, it's true that it's an unsolved issue, but CMake is pretty much a standard and it can handle dependencies, if someone knows how it works. Sorry, but this is a story of poor choices and unskilled people for this huge job.