4 ms·

I actually think Windows Phone was close to a breakthrough when Microsoft shut it down. Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blog

I actually think Windows Phone was close to a breakthrough when Microsoft shut it down. Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. Normal people loved the hub experiences and it had enough apps for them, with missing ones eventually coming out by the time normal people knew they wanted them. Tech Bloggers couldn't stand that a startup would launch on Apple (not even Android) and they couldn't download them and write about them. They made a lot of noise about this. But it was always nonsense.

mort96 1y ago
Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps. I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
sillystu04 1y ago
In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.
- lproven 1y ago
  > In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. Absolutely right. It gave up too early. And Mozilla gave up on B2G too early. KaiOS has been quite a big hit and it's still making money. In time, the hardware came down to meet the requirements of what wasn't a really lightweight OS when it was launched in 2013 or so.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I think it would have continued to struggle simply due to Microsoft’s inability get its dev story straight. Devs had largely fled to iOS and Android because those platforms weren’t nearly as bad about pulling the rug out from under devs as Windows Phone was. A lot of goodwill had been burned and wasn’t coming back.
- toast0 1y ago
  Microsoft was burning devs on each major release, and that was a big issue. But IMHO, windows mobile 10 was a disasterous release and that doomed it. WP7 and WP8 weren't amazing (although three of us liked it), but they offered tremendous value on the low end. You could get a $100 WP8 phone that was more responsive than a $250 Android phone. Microsoft was telling people that most WP8 devices would be upgradable to WM10, then they removed low memory devices from the list, then they released WM10 in such a state that upgrading anything was a bad idea. In particular, (trident) Edge was so awful, it was almost unusable. Mobile IE had a terrible rendering engine, but at least the UI was responsive. Edge queued inputs, so when a page was busy loading, it wouldn't respond to the back or stop buttons or navigating to a new page until the page finished loading... Not sure what the stop button is there for when it waits to stop until after everything is done. When you are driving developers away by launching a different development model every release, users are going to be driven to the browser, and if it sucks too, what are they going to do? WM10 had Continuum for high end phones which is neat, but it neglected the low end market where WP7 and WP8 shone. It wasn't until the final build of WM10 that they got performance to be good on my test phone. (Edge still sucked) But that was way too late. They needed to have WM10 come out of the gate as good or better than WP8. AFAIK, WM10 never got bigger installed base numbers compared to WP8 even though many WP8 devices were upgradable to WM10. Perhaps moving phones into the overall Windows org wasn't the right choice for the product. Almost certainly eliminating dedicated Test engineers reduced the quality of the product. In an alternate reality where Microsoft provided a usable WM10 base install, tested and fixed WP8 -> WM10 upgrades before release so apps didn't fail on upgrade, had an option of a reasonable browser (letting android or chrome into the store or at least offering the old mobile ie), things would have been a lot better. If Intel hadn't pulled the plug on Atom for phones days before the Continuum demo, it might have been buy a high end x86 Windows Phone and run win32 apps on it when you're at your desk... Maybe WM10 would have still failed, but it would have put up a good fight.
afavour 1y ago
I think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling. MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously. You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones That’s not true; I developed a WP7 Silverlight app that worked with just minor bugfixes through Windows Mobile 10. What they did do was bungle the marketing on it, so the public conciousness mixed up “WP7 devices can’t run WP8 apps” and “WP8 devices can’t run WP7 apps”.
  - afavour 1y ago
    Ah, you’re right… but if I recall a lot of apps (if they weren’t abandoned) were WP8 only releases. The platform felt very dead, very quickly.
  - toast0 1y ago
    I mean, it was more than marketing. It was hard to build an app that would use WP8 features on WP8 but also run on WP7. If you kept building for WP7, the WP8 features were unavailable; you'd end up with maybe a shared core and a WP7 app plus a WP8 app, and then WP8.1 did the same kind of thing, and finally WM10 let you build "universal" apps which would only run on WM10, which never managed to get an current install count more than WP8, and might not have managed to surpass WP7 either. WP7 itself was a throwing away of compatability with Windows Mobile apps; reportedly, that loss of goodwill is why Google refused to support the platform. WM6.5 apps would have been out of place on WP7, but if Microsoft was still yelling about developers x3, maybe they would have made that transition possible --- require a new frontend for cohesive UX, but allow for core libraries from older apps to run as-is, instead of forcing the new apis.
fidotron 1y ago
There were curious incidents like this: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1494461/why-is-google-blocking-windows-phone-s-youtube-app-in-a-word-fear.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1494461/why-is-google-... But I tend to share the view that WP was, with the Nokia WP8 devices, finally getting somewhere. The fact not everything had to go through Silverlight to get on the screen was a big help! There was a lot of noise in the industry back in that era that suggested this whole fight was far more intense and nastier than many would imagine (and I have to be careful to not be any more specific than that), but ultimately I believe Android only reached an acceptable state because of the need to defend from iOS and Windows Phone/RT.
dahauns 1y ago
> Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. From the perspective of a European carrier back in the day: This would probably have been true in the early iOS/Android days, but by then we were wayy in the "There's an app for that" era. All metrics we had back then showed potential app availability being the tie-breaker and the "WP has no apps" perception the biggest reason for consumers to avoid it.

mort96 1y ago

Sorry but nobody is going to use a phone where they can't chat with their friends via whatever chat app they're already using or transfer money via whatever money transfer apps their social group is already using or transfer money between their existing bank accounts with their bank's apps or check in with their flights or use their city's public transport infrastructure apps or parking payment apps or car charging apps or taxi hauling apps or food delivery apps. I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.

sillystu04 1y ago

In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.

lproven 1y ago
> In hindsight, it would've been worthwhile for Microsoft to tolerate heavy losses for a decade on Windows phone. Like they did with Bing or Azure. Absolutely right. It gave up too early. And Mozilla gave up on B2G too early. KaiOS has been quite a big hit and it's still making money. In time, the hardware came down to meet the requirements of what wasn't a really lightweight OS when it was launched in 2013 or so.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

I think it would have continued to struggle simply due to Microsoft’s inability get its dev story straight. Devs had largely fled to iOS and Android because those platforms weren’t nearly as bad about pulling the rug out from under devs as Windows Phone was. A lot of goodwill had been burned and wasn’t coming back.

toast0 1y ago
Microsoft was burning devs on each major release, and that was a big issue. But IMHO, windows mobile 10 was a disasterous release and that doomed it. WP7 and WP8 weren't amazing (although three of us liked it), but they offered tremendous value on the low end. You could get a $100 WP8 phone that was more responsive than a $250 Android phone. Microsoft was telling people that most WP8 devices would be upgradable to WM10, then they removed low memory devices from the list, then they released WM10 in such a state that upgrading anything was a bad idea. In particular, (trident) Edge was so awful, it was almost unusable. Mobile IE had a terrible rendering engine, but at least the UI was responsive. Edge queued inputs, so when a page was busy loading, it wouldn't respond to the back or stop buttons or navigating to a new page until the page finished loading... Not sure what the stop button is there for when it waits to stop until after everything is done. When you are driving developers away by launching a different development model every release, users are going to be driven to the browser, and if it sucks too, what are they going to do? WM10 had Continuum for high end phones which is neat, but it neglected the low end market where WP7 and WP8 shone. It wasn't until the final build of WM10 that they got performance to be good on my test phone. (Edge still sucked) But that was way too late. They needed to have WM10 come out of the gate as good or better than WP8. AFAIK, WM10 never got bigger installed base numbers compared to WP8 even though many WP8 devices were upgradable to WM10. Perhaps moving phones into the overall Windows org wasn't the right choice for the product. Almost certainly eliminating dedicated Test engineers reduced the quality of the product. In an alternate reality where Microsoft provided a usable WM10 base install, tested and fixed WP8 -> WM10 upgrades before release so apps didn't fail on upgrade, had an option of a reasonable browser (letting android or chrome into the store or at least offering the old mobile ie), things would have been a lot better. If Intel hadn't pulled the plug on Atom for phones days before the Continuum demo, it might have been buy a high end x86 Windows Phone and run win32 apps on it when you're at your desk... Maybe WM10 would have still failed, but it would have put up a good fight.

afavour 1y ago

I think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling. MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously. You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.

Marsymars 1y ago
> removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones That’s not true; I developed a WP7 Silverlight app that worked with just minor bugfixes through Windows Mobile 10. What they did do was bungle the marketing on it, so the public conciousness mixed up “WP7 devices can’t run WP8 apps” and “WP8 devices can’t run WP7 apps”.
- afavour 1y ago
  Ah, you’re right… but if I recall a lot of apps (if they weren’t abandoned) were WP8 only releases. The platform felt very dead, very quickly.
- toast0 1y ago
  I mean, it was more than marketing. It was hard to build an app that would use WP8 features on WP8 but also run on WP7. If you kept building for WP7, the WP8 features were unavailable; you'd end up with maybe a shared core and a WP7 app plus a WP8 app, and then WP8.1 did the same kind of thing, and finally WM10 let you build "universal" apps which would only run on WM10, which never managed to get an current install count more than WP8, and might not have managed to surpass WP7 either. WP7 itself was a throwing away of compatability with Windows Mobile apps; reportedly, that loss of goodwill is why Google refused to support the platform. WM6.5 apps would have been out of place on WP7, but if Microsoft was still yelling about developers x3, maybe they would have made that transition possible --- require a new frontend for cohesive UX, but allow for core libraries from older apps to run as-is, instead of forcing the new apis.

fidotron 1y ago

There were curious incidents like this: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1494461/why-is-google-blocking-windows-phone-s-youtube-app-in-a-word-fear.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1494461/why-is-google-... But I tend to share the view that WP was, with the Nokia WP8 devices, finally getting somewhere. The fact not everything had to go through Silverlight to get on the screen was a big help! There was a lot of noise in the industry back in that era that suggested this whole fight was far more intense and nastier than many would imagine (and I have to be careful to not be any more specific than that), but ultimately I believe Android only reached an acceptable state because of the need to defend from iOS and Windows Phone/RT.

dahauns 1y ago

> Apps were always important, yes, but wayyy less so outside the tech blogger circle for everyday users. From the perspective of a European carrier back in the day: This would probably have been true in the early iOS/Android days, but by then we were wayy in the "There's an app for that" era. All metrics we had back then showed potential app availability being the tie-breaker and the "WP has no apps" perception the biggest reason for consumers to avoid it.