4 ms·

I heard one of the reasons Microsoft had to ruthless kill support for phones when switching from WP7 to 8 to 10 was Qualcomm not willing to ship chipset drivers

I heard one of the reasons Microsoft had to ruthless kill support for phones when switching from WP7 to 8 to 10 was Qualcomm not willing to ship chipset drivers for the older devices with the new kernels in each of those iterations. It would have gotten Microsoft a lot of goodwill if they had, but strangely enough Microsoft at that time did not seem to be interested in the goodwill of Windows Phone users anyway :-) I'm still hanging on to a 950XL for some weird reason.

toast0 6y ago
From WP7 to WP8 was WinCE kernel and single core to WinNT kernel and multicore. Maybe the WP7 devices could do it, but not with good performance. That one just wasn't going to happen. Most of the WP8 devices were able to run WM 10, but the experience was really poor on the low memory devices, so those didn't get a release outside of the public insider builds. There was one or two devices that didn't get upgrades for some reason, other than those and the low memory devices upgrading to 10 was available, but it took a long time for them to get around to fixing things; it actually got a lot better in the release after they officially gave up. Possibly if there was a focus on mobile during development of 10, they could have made the first release good, and maybe even got it to work OK on low memory devices; Edge was still going to be trash though. All of that said, a bigger problem was dumping goodwill of developers. WP7, WP8, and WM10 all had new frameworks for apps that were needed for new functionality and didn't work with prior Microsoft OSes; calling the WM10 one 'Universal' was darkly humorous.
- Marsymars 6y ago
  > All of that said, a bigger problem was dumping goodwill of developers. WP7, WP8, and WM10 all had new frameworks for apps that were needed for new functionality and didn't work with prior Microsoft OSes; calling the WM10 one 'Universal' was darkly humorous. I think this was somewhat overstated, since compatibility in the other direction was great. I wrote a WP7 app that worked fine across WP7/WP8/WM10 that I supported until MS pulled the plug entirely on the ecosystem.

toast0 6y ago

From WP7 to WP8 was WinCE kernel and single core to WinNT kernel and multicore. Maybe the WP7 devices could do it, but not with good performance. That one just wasn't going to happen. Most of the WP8 devices were able to run WM 10, but the experience was really poor on the low memory devices, so those didn't get a release outside of the public insider builds. There was one or two devices that didn't get upgrades for some reason, other than those and the low memory devices upgrading to 10 was available, but it took a long time for them to get around to fixing things; it actually got a lot better in the release after they officially gave up. Possibly if there was a focus on mobile during development of 10, they could have made the first release good, and maybe even got it to work OK on low memory devices; Edge was still going to be trash though. All of that said, a bigger problem was dumping goodwill of developers. WP7, WP8, and WM10 all had new frameworks for apps that were needed for new functionality and didn't work with prior Microsoft OSes; calling the WM10 one 'Universal' was darkly humorous.

Marsymars 6y ago
> All of that said, a bigger problem was dumping goodwill of developers. WP7, WP8, and WM10 all had new frameworks for apps that were needed for new functionality and didn't work with prior Microsoft OSes; calling the WM10 one 'Universal' was darkly humorous. I think this was somewhat overstated, since compatibility in the other direction was great. I wrote a WP7 app that worked fine across WP7/WP8/WM10 that I supported until MS pulled the plug entirely on the ecosystem.