Some people, when discussing cryptocurrencies, make a point of talking about how important this technology can be for the masses of the world, not just for privileged people in the West. I agree with this, but I find this ideal is not always adhered to. If you are starting a new altcoin, or a new generic decentralized platform that can be used for anything, including finance, insurance, voting, content distribution, and many other things we can't yet anticipate, I think there is a low bar you need to meet before launching your actual applications.
The days of launching a Windows-only client are over, whether you believe it, like it, or care about it. This is unacceptable. Any new altcoin, or other decentralized system that aspires to establish a new reality, needs to move beyond the 1990s. If you're serious, any client you produce must be available, from day one, at the very least, on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Mobile would be available as well, though this needn't require native apps for Android, Windows and iOS, a working HTML5 client is good enough. Ideally, some kind of non-smartphone interface would be offered as well.
Andreas Antonopoulos, and others, have often compared Bitcoin to TCP/IP. It's not just a currency, it's a protocol, which helps to build a new infrastructure, and the foundation of an entirely new system for financial and even social relations between people throughout the world. A platform that anyone can build upon. But TCP/IP was platform agnostic. It could be implemented by anyone, in almost any language, on almost any platform, and it was. In the early days, you had web browsers (or gopher clients) running on at least a dozen different OSes, even if some of them sucked, and we try to forget about them. :) TCP/IP allowed, for the first time, universal communication, not between people, directly, but between the systems they used.
Bitcoin, and similar technologies, are clearly the next step in the evolution of the Internet, that I believe, but if you try to launch a project, today, in this space, with an old-school client that only works on a single operating system, well, I wouldn't want to express myself any further.
