It completely depends on which platform you're writing for. Single Platform Native Code is Easier than ever: In the 1990s, you could write a CRUD program in a

It completely depends on which platform you're writing for. Single Platform Native Code is Easier than ever: In the 1990s, you could write a CRUD program in a few hours in VB6, Access, or Delphi back in the 1990s. It would run on most computers worldwide, and was likely small enough to fit on a 1.4 Mb Floppy Disk, with help files, an installer, and everything. This is the software model that the Internet is optimized to deliver. Native code, direct from a programmer. It still works in many cases. GitHub has even made it easier than ever. However, this is not the model the "market" has been pushed into. -- The app store - a horrible compromise If you can stomach the restrictions, you can still write native code, subject to review and restrictions, to be deployed through an "App Store". I've never done this, but I do know that many things just don't align with their business model. So, if you're going down this route, you have to price your software, and meet the arbitrary restrictions of the walled garden it's going to serve. You will, at least, be able to run native code directly on the device, so that's nice. However, when the owners of the garden change their mind, your program may disappear, or you may be forced into changes that are otherwise unacceptable -- The web - a descent into madness If you're unfortunate enough to not be able to write native code, directly deployed, the environments in which software is expected to work have become abysmal. For you, it was unavoidable that things got orders of magnitude worse. Now, you're expected to put the interface of a program through the internet into a web browser that might be on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, or even perhaps a smartwatch. There's no consistent interface. Thanks to a lack of secure general purpose computing, nobody is willing, nor should they be, to run code from somewhere else, unless it's from an "app store". -- I don't see things getting better for another decade or so. Eventually a consistent set of GUI widgets and interfaces will be found, and a consensus will be reached about how things should act on a Desktop vs Tablet vs Watch, etc. The shift to open source software was a great advance, but the shift to installing/downloading dependencies from the internet at install time was a horrible choice. There needs to be a way to lock all dependencies, "security" be damned. You should be able to run programs written a decade ago without having to rewrite it to adapt to all the breaking changes that seem to be so quick to happen in Open source. Security is part of the OS, and any application libraries shouldn't be able to make the situation worse. Only capability based Operating Systems can resolve that dilemma.