4 ms·

I owned Lumia 920 and 930. Hardware was good, I liked the OS. I eventually switched to iOS due to 3rd party app support. It was annoying when the apps you wante

I owned Lumia 920 and 930. Hardware was good, I liked the OS. I eventually switched to iOS due to 3rd party app support. It was annoying when the apps you wanted to try were either not available or were lacking features. In my view the app support killed the platform. It would have been impossible to fix. Even if Microsoft had paid for the development it would not have made sense for companies to spend time with WP versions for just a few users.

toast0 9y ago
App support was problematic, in part because Microsoft kept coming up with new, incompatible ways to develop apps. Apps for WP7 could work on WP8 and W10M (except sometimes, when the app compat didn't work right on upgrade, and users had to wipe their phone and try again, and Microsoft never fixed it); but there was also a 'new way' to build apps for WP8 that was required for some features, and a new way to build 'universal' apps for W10M that didn't work on any of the other versions of Windows Phone. To say nothing of the apps for Windows Mobile 6 that were thrown away (despite WP7 still being Windows CE, but with a fancy skin). It's one thing to build an app for a platform with not very many users; it's another to build three similar apps for three similar platforms that don't have very many users. This is something Microsoft should have done better, and falls in the camp of if you're going to be a third ecosystem, you have to be consistently good.
- akmittal 9y ago
  This is the reason progressive web apps are good investment. In future if a new mobile platform evolves, it only has to support PWAs and they will have thousands of apps.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And that was basically what allowed iOS and Android to flourish. Microsoft already had an established platform with the PocketPC lineage (damn it, Opera Mobile originated on such devices!) and yet they dropped that like hot potato once the media started yakking about iPhones. You would have thought that Microsoft of all companies understood the value of platforms, having maintained Win32 compatibility for a decade already at that point. Similarly Nokia bought Trolltech for their Qt UI toolkit, because it would allow software to be developed that could be compiled for both Maemo and Symbian. But before that could be put into effect, the board panicked and brought in Elop (in large part because of American pension funds, apparently).

toast0 9y ago

App support was problematic, in part because Microsoft kept coming up with new, incompatible ways to develop apps. Apps for WP7 could work on WP8 and W10M (except sometimes, when the app compat didn't work right on upgrade, and users had to wipe their phone and try again, and Microsoft never fixed it); but there was also a 'new way' to build apps for WP8 that was required for some features, and a new way to build 'universal' apps for W10M that didn't work on any of the other versions of Windows Phone. To say nothing of the apps for Windows Mobile 6 that were thrown away (despite WP7 still being Windows CE, but with a fancy skin). It's one thing to build an app for a platform with not very many users; it's another to build three similar apps for three similar platforms that don't have very many users. This is something Microsoft should have done better, and falls in the camp of if you're going to be a third ecosystem, you have to be consistently good.

akmittal 9y ago
This is the reason progressive web apps are good investment. In future if a new mobile platform evolves, it only has to support PWAs and they will have thousands of apps.
digi_owl 9y ago
And that was basically what allowed iOS and Android to flourish. Microsoft already had an established platform with the PocketPC lineage (damn it, Opera Mobile originated on such devices!) and yet they dropped that like hot potato once the media started yakking about iPhones. You would have thought that Microsoft of all companies understood the value of platforms, having maintained Win32 compatibility for a decade already at that point. Similarly Nokia bought Trolltech for their Qt UI toolkit, because it would allow software to be developed that could be compiled for both Maemo and Symbian. But before that could be put into effect, the board panicked and brought in Elop (in large part because of American pension funds, apparently).