7 ms·

Wow. I can't believe there were all these restrictions and upheavals. I loved two of my Lumia devices. I didn't know you needed Windows 8 for development. Bad m

Wow. I can't believe there were all these restrictions and upheavals. I loved two of my Lumia devices. I didn't know you needed Windows 8 for development. Bad move. No less with the phone doing better in different parts of the world, having Windows 8 as a requirement is obviously bad. The incompatibility of apps was lame the first go around. I had bad luck with my devices and so I was out by the time of Windows 10. I didn't know the incompatibility happened a second time. I don't think the browser or "slow devices" as you say are the reason for its demise at all though. Windows on mobile was a great OS. I believe even with all the faults you mention, if they were somehow able to get the top 25 to 50 apps onto their store, we would still have Windows mobile around today with a ~10% market share worldwide (varying greatly by country). Of course getting the apps onto their store would be an undertaking so it's quite hypothetical. My main point is, I firmly believe that is what killed Windows and any other OS that arrived late or never got popular enough by 2011 or so, when a few major apps were already desired by many people or at least the hype and talk would tell people that. P.S. I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive.

stuaxo 9y ago
Bah, even though Symbian was a bit workaday, think it was killed off too early. Microsoft killed S60 (Symbian) and kept S40 for their lower phones, when S60 could have just become the base.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  I never messed with Symbian too much. You think it actually had a chance at being decent in the post iOS world?
  - kccqzy 9y ago
    I've had fond memories of S40. It had a good-ish browser (Opera Mini) and lots of Java apps.
    - sundvor 9y ago
      I was going to say, I had fond memories of my N810. However that was a Maemo based device, which sadly fizzled out.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    With Nokia's purchase of Qt it had a shot, Symbians main failing was a really awful SDK IMHO - if they hadn't spread themselves so thin with Maemo/meego and just used Symbian as an underlying platform for new Qt apps and added touch support quickly they may have survived.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Symbian was great as user OS, for developers not so much. It used a C++ dialect called Symbian C++, basically Hungarian notation everywhere, special semantics how objects were created (Two-phase creation), strings could not be used directly, ARM trap errors instead of exceptions, and so on. They also rebooted the SDK multiple times, initially Code Warrior based, then a set of Eclipse CDT plugins, then they rebooted it and created another Eclipse attempt called Caride. They eventually added POSIX support (PIPS), but just nowadays with Android, due to lack of updates, not every device could take apps that made use of PIPS. Then came Qt, but it was pretty much WIP by the time the burning platform memo came to be.
  - hackpert 9y ago
    Symbian was one really good OS for the pre-iOS world. A basic S60 button-phone was capable of multitasking, copy-paste, profiles (which Android and iOS still lack) and could even pull off some decent graphics in games that weren't seen till years later on iPhone/Android devices. I even remember writing an app to SSH into my computer in the rather awful implementation of C++ it supported. But it transitioned to touch interfaces poorly, at least initially. The first few versions of S60v5 for the Nokia 5800 were horrid, with basic things such as drag to scroll unimplemented. It did improve considerably over time (by late 2011-2012), but by then the market had moved on. Also, it was a great OS for tinkerers because it wasn't hard to gain access to the OS files and play around with stuff, install sis and jar files, modify signatures (alright, that's a bit shady but I was ten, give me a break) and whatnot, but I imagine the lack of a central app store until much later did the platform no good either, because apps were slightly hard to find for a general user, and carriers (where I lived) often scammed users by offering free jar apps picked from the web on their portals for absurd amount of money.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      The last version, Belle, was quite nice to use.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Another great feature for tinkerers was PyS60, the official Nokia port of Python, which had a decent API for many of the phone functions (GPS, camera, etc). Plus it had ask-on-use permissions built-in before the iPhone was even a thing.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      That said, Symbian didn't just have Nokia's S60 UI. There was also UIQ. Used by Sony Ericsson on their P series, and Motorola in various models.
- quitegreen 9y ago
  Sadlly, S40 platform hasn't been used for many years. Nokia/Microsoft feature phones use badly rewritten S30 platform for Mediatek hardware that doesn't even support Bluetooth hands-free headsets or any kind of synchronization capabilities while having Bluetooth hardware.
Rjevski 9y ago
Well sure there were fast devices but those were at the same price you could get an iPhone or high-end Android and those were already proven to be good, while Microsoft was still unknown. People don't usually throw ~700$ at a device they're not sure about.
roryisok 9y ago
Microsoft worked hard to get the top apps on the store, but you cant force a company to release an app for your OS. The biggest blow was google not giving them anything. No official YouTube app, no gmail, no maps etc. There were third party and even MS / Nokia apps that filled the gap just fine, but newcomers wanted to install gmail. Google actively fought MS on windows phone. It seems silly now that they'd see WP as a threat at all, but even 2-3 years ago they were sabotaging MSs attempts to build a youtube app. MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were. IIRC it was to do with displaying ads. At the time the official google apps did not do ads. MS had to revert to essentially a shortcut to YouTube in the browser. Aside from that most of the big players were there, but when new trendy app would launch, it would launch on android and IOS. WP users would have to wait for a critical mass of popularity in the hope that there would be a port.
- toyg 9y ago
  > The biggest blow was google not giving them anything. I wonder why they did that? Oh yeah, it's exactly like Microsoft not "giving" anything to the Linux desktop, ever.
  - roryisok 9y ago
    yes, its exactly like that. why help the competition?
  - beagle3 9y ago
    ahem. Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts. "ever" is a strong word.
    - toyg 9y ago
      Come on, don't give me that. Fonts were literally ripped from the MS download site, they were never packaged or promoted to the Linux world, they couldn't even be redistributed. And VS Code is a tool for developers, mostly aimed at the Mac crowd, released in 2015, almost 20 years after KDE and more than 15 since GNOME started. VSC has nothing to do with the Linux desktop. Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.
scarface74 9y ago
I didn't know you needed Windows 8 for development. Bad move. As opposed to Apple requiring you to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? I doubt that having to install Windows 8 - especially since you could use a VM - was a large deterrent to a lot of people.
- beagle3 9y ago
  Hobby developers (which were the vast majority of apps int the first days of the ios app store) were most definitely deterred. That was Windows 8, not even 8.1, which was a complete joke of an operating system. The first wave of ios apps came from Mac developers; then people started buying macs to build ios apps. The first wave of WP apps didn't come .... because there were very few people who could build an app on their existing dev environment (win8 uptake among developers was abysmal). Furthermore, the first ios wave actually came from the homebrew scene, which organically grew and produced ios apps even before Apple provided an SDK; There was never such enthusiasm for MS to build on. The WP8 requirement was just adding insult to injury.
ikurei 9y ago
> I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive. My first smartphone was a Palm Pre. I then switched to some of the first kind-of-mature android phones, like the HTC Desire and the Galaxy S2. I remember feeling like I had taken a huge leap forward in hardware, but a backwards leap in software. Even today I miss some things of WebOS. WebOS nailed the experience of having two documents of the same app. Each "card" could be a document, or a view into something, and each app could have several of those. A short while ago I tried to write an email for which I needed to look often at another previous email. This is trivial on any desktop, but was a mayor pain on the mobile device I tried it (can't remember if Android tablet or iPad, but I doubt it's very different). (If I recall correctly, Android today allows apps to expose several "Cards", or several views at the same time in the task switcher, but no apps do. For a while Chrome had an option to treat every tab as an independent card, which I liked but was messy for many people... Every time I use a mobile device for anything serious, I think "This would be so much more comfortable and natural on Mac/Windows/Linux" every 5 minutes. May be it's just I'm antiquated.)
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I suspect the basic problem is that to support much of the new stuff in Android app management, one have to embrace Fragments. And few apps have, as best i can tell.

stuaxo 9y ago

Bah, even though Symbian was a bit workaday, think it was killed off too early. Microsoft killed S60 (Symbian) and kept S40 for their lower phones, when S60 could have just become the base.

skinnymuch 9y ago
I never messed with Symbian too much. You think it actually had a chance at being decent in the post iOS world?
- kccqzy 9y ago
  I've had fond memories of S40. It had a good-ish browser (Opera Mini) and lots of Java apps.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    I was going to say, I had fond memories of my N810. However that was a Maemo based device, which sadly fizzled out.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  With Nokia's purchase of Qt it had a shot, Symbians main failing was a really awful SDK IMHO - if they hadn't spread themselves so thin with Maemo/meego and just used Symbian as an underlying platform for new Qt apps and added touch support quickly they may have survived.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Symbian was great as user OS, for developers not so much. It used a C++ dialect called Symbian C++, basically Hungarian notation everywhere, special semantics how objects were created (Two-phase creation), strings could not be used directly, ARM trap errors instead of exceptions, and so on. They also rebooted the SDK multiple times, initially Code Warrior based, then a set of Eclipse CDT plugins, then they rebooted it and created another Eclipse attempt called Caride. They eventually added POSIX support (PIPS), but just nowadays with Android, due to lack of updates, not every device could take apps that made use of PIPS. Then came Qt, but it was pretty much WIP by the time the burning platform memo came to be.
- hackpert 9y ago
  Symbian was one really good OS for the pre-iOS world. A basic S60 button-phone was capable of multitasking, copy-paste, profiles (which Android and iOS still lack) and could even pull off some decent graphics in games that weren't seen till years later on iPhone/Android devices. I even remember writing an app to SSH into my computer in the rather awful implementation of C++ it supported. But it transitioned to touch interfaces poorly, at least initially. The first few versions of S60v5 for the Nokia 5800 were horrid, with basic things such as drag to scroll unimplemented. It did improve considerably over time (by late 2011-2012), but by then the market had moved on. Also, it was a great OS for tinkerers because it wasn't hard to gain access to the OS files and play around with stuff, install sis and jar files, modify signatures (alright, that's a bit shady but I was ten, give me a break) and whatnot, but I imagine the lack of a central app store until much later did the platform no good either, because apps were slightly hard to find for a general user, and carriers (where I lived) often scammed users by offering free jar apps picked from the web on their portals for absurd amount of money.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    The last version, Belle, was quite nice to use.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Another great feature for tinkerers was PyS60, the official Nokia port of Python, which had a decent API for many of the phone functions (GPS, camera, etc). Plus it had ask-on-use permissions built-in before the iPhone was even a thing.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    That said, Symbian didn't just have Nokia's S60 UI. There was also UIQ. Used by Sony Ericsson on their P series, and Motorola in various models.
quitegreen 9y ago
Sadlly, S40 platform hasn't been used for many years. Nokia/Microsoft feature phones use badly rewritten S30 platform for Mediatek hardware that doesn't even support Bluetooth hands-free headsets or any kind of synchronization capabilities while having Bluetooth hardware.

Rjevski 9y ago

Well sure there were fast devices but those were at the same price you could get an iPhone or high-end Android and those were already proven to be good, while Microsoft was still unknown. People don't usually throw ~700$ at a device they're not sure about.

roryisok 9y ago

Microsoft worked hard to get the top apps on the store, but you cant force a company to release an app for your OS. The biggest blow was google not giving them anything. No official YouTube app, no gmail, no maps etc. There were third party and even MS / Nokia apps that filled the gap just fine, but newcomers wanted to install gmail. Google actively fought MS on windows phone. It seems silly now that they'd see WP as a threat at all, but even 2-3 years ago they were sabotaging MSs attempts to build a youtube app. MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were. IIRC it was to do with displaying ads. At the time the official google apps did not do ads. MS had to revert to essentially a shortcut to YouTube in the browser. Aside from that most of the big players were there, but when new trendy app would launch, it would launch on android and IOS. WP users would have to wait for a critical mass of popularity in the hope that there would be a port.

toyg 9y ago
> The biggest blow was google not giving them anything. I wonder why they did that? Oh yeah, it's exactly like Microsoft not "giving" anything to the Linux desktop, ever.
- roryisok 9y ago
  yes, its exactly like that. why help the competition?
- beagle3 9y ago
  ahem. Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts. "ever" is a strong word.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Come on, don't give me that. Fonts were literally ripped from the MS download site, they were never packaged or promoted to the Linux world, they couldn't even be redistributed. And VS Code is a tool for developers, mostly aimed at the Mac crowd, released in 2015, almost 20 years after KDE and more than 15 since GNOME started. VSC has nothing to do with the Linux desktop. Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.

scarface74 9y ago

I didn't know you needed Windows 8 for development. Bad move. As opposed to Apple requiring you to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? I doubt that having to install Windows 8 - especially since you could use a VM - was a large deterrent to a lot of people.

beagle3 9y ago
Hobby developers (which were the vast majority of apps int the first days of the ios app store) were most definitely deterred. That was Windows 8, not even 8.1, which was a complete joke of an operating system. The first wave of ios apps came from Mac developers; then people started buying macs to build ios apps. The first wave of WP apps didn't come .... because there were very few people who could build an app on their existing dev environment (win8 uptake among developers was abysmal). Furthermore, the first ios wave actually came from the homebrew scene, which organically grew and produced ios apps even before Apple provided an SDK; There was never such enthusiasm for MS to build on. The WP8 requirement was just adding insult to injury.

ikurei 9y ago

> I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive. My first smartphone was a Palm Pre. I then switched to some of the first kind-of-mature android phones, like the HTC Desire and the Galaxy S2. I remember feeling like I had taken a huge leap forward in hardware, but a backwards leap in software. Even today I miss some things of WebOS. WebOS nailed the experience of having two documents of the same app. Each "card" could be a document, or a view into something, and each app could have several of those. A short while ago I tried to write an email for which I needed to look often at another previous email. This is trivial on any desktop, but was a mayor pain on the mobile device I tried it (can't remember if Android tablet or iPad, but I doubt it's very different). (If I recall correctly, Android today allows apps to expose several "Cards", or several views at the same time in the task switcher, but no apps do. For a while Chrome had an option to treat every tab as an independent card, which I liked but was messy for many people... Every time I use a mobile device for anything serious, I think "This would be so much more comfortable and natural on Mac/Windows/Linux" every 5 minutes. May be it's just I'm antiquated.)

digi_owl 9y ago
I suspect the basic problem is that to support much of the new stuff in Android app management, one have to embrace Fragments. And few apps have, as best i can tell.