Windows Phone 7 was pretty clear [1] it was a temporary platform (bootstrapped on Silverlight) while they waited for the engineering projects that were to becom

Windows Phone 7 was pretty clear [1] it was a temporary platform (bootstrapped on Silverlight) while they waited for the engineering projects that were to become Windows Phone 8 finished. Microsoft helped pay to migrate some projects across that hump and there was a migration story. That's the only "hard fork" between the versions. I know a lot of people (including respondents in neighboring comments) saw the changes between WP8 and WP10 as a big deal "soft fork", but very little actually changed other than a UI library upgrade from 1.x to 2.x. (In .NET; JS was dropped in 2.x and C/C++ developers saw some other shenanigans. But JS and C/C++ didn't exist in WP7 either so none of those developers saw all three "migrations" either.) I hear a lot from developers that it seemed very fragmented, but working in it at the time, it seemed very "incremental" at best, mostly just upgrading library major versions and dealing with semver major breaking breaks. Sure, that's frustrating when that's not your primary development environment and also you aren't getting paid enough for it because adoption is low, but that is a very far cry from "Microsoft didn't have a good plan". They were iterating hard on it. They made some semver breaks that other library authors in other ecosystems could get away with no problem, even with equally low adoption (looking at random JS libraries here). It's easy to blame low adoption for making those semver major breaks seem more painful and "fragmented" than they actually were in practice, but sometimes it just also looks like that was an excuse to ignore the platform more than a problem for development experience reality. (As you seem to state that you skipped the platform entirely, possibly because you were looking for an excuse to skip it and latched onto the first one you saw.) [1] Obviously not clear enough for some.