To me it was also crazy how basically being the third player to the table for the modern smartphone, they pretended to already be in Apple's position. Like you

To me it was also crazy how basically being the third player to the table for the modern smartphone, they pretended to already be in Apple's position. Like you said, lack of third party apps killed it. On a whim I wanted to dabble in WP dev a bit in I think late 2014, and just to launch the dev environment I needed to have a dev account which was still paid at that point iirc. I guess that's how you get more people to port their apps over to a platform that has no market share. And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out! Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.