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There were many things I liked about the Windows Phone OS. The alphabetical listing UI is far better than what Android/iOS have. (in iOS you can jump to a speci

There were many things I liked about the Windows Phone OS. The alphabetical listing UI is far better than what Android/iOS have. (in iOS you can jump to a specific letter with a precise tap along the side. In WP, you could tap on a letter to bring up a pop-over list of letters.. much easier!). Its keyboard was excellent. The navigation bar in the apps would be icons, but could be expanded to show labels for each of the icons. The home screen theming was excellent. The phones had a physical button for using the camera (until that restriction was lifted). But, yeah, WP didn't have the apps people wanted to use. I don't like that Apple's iOS is so locked down. Apparently even the App Store isn't free of clutter. -- It's concerning that the opposite (a complete lack of curation, and an encouragement to write apps) doesn't end up as a competitive phone OS.

greyhair 5y ago
Agree on all points. As a registered Windows Insider, I had Windows Phone 10 installed at beta, and as much as I liked the UI and behavior of the original Windows Phone, Windows Phone 10 was even better. I held onto that phone until the bitter end, then flopped over to Android. The Nokia Maps app was sufficient, I don't use much more than that. If Microsoft rebooted Windows Phone with support for the Android app store, I would be back on that in a heartbeat. People that never used it will never understand, and people that did, will never forget.
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danShumway 5y ago
I didn't like how locked down the Windows Phone OS was, even for the time, and I didn't like some of the limitations that popped up around app capabilities. But otherwise, agreed, they had some good UX ideas, I liked their interface a lot, there are concepts there that would still hold up really well today on a mobile OS. And it was certainly (imo) a lot nicer to develop on than Android. But... yeah, the app ecosystem.

greyhair 5y ago

Agree on all points. As a registered Windows Insider, I had Windows Phone 10 installed at beta, and as much as I liked the UI and behavior of the original Windows Phone, Windows Phone 10 was even better. I held onto that phone until the bitter end, then flopped over to Android. The Nokia Maps app was sufficient, I don't use much more than that. If Microsoft rebooted Windows Phone with support for the Android app store, I would be back on that in a heartbeat. People that never used it will never understand, and people that did, will never forget.

deleted 5y ago
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danShumway 5y ago

I didn't like how locked down the Windows Phone OS was, even for the time, and I didn't like some of the limitations that popped up around app capabilities. But otherwise, agreed, they had some good UX ideas, I liked their interface a lot, there are concepts there that would still hold up really well today on a mobile OS. And it was certainly (imo) a lot nicer to develop on than Android. But... yeah, the app ecosystem.