6 ms·

FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had

FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.

sunflowerfly 1y ago
Microsoft gave up on a phone operating system far too early.
- paxys 1y ago
  Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.
  - DrBenCarson 1y ago
    They were already working on Windows Phone when Ballmer said that. That’s why he said it. They were targeting a lower cost segment. Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor
    - sheepscreek 1y ago
      I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?
      - microtherion 1y ago
        I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).
  - sheepscreek 1y ago
    When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day. Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
    - zeroq 1y ago
      I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak. They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them. It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy. If anything, Nokia was distaster.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can not fuck things up and invent new things.
        sumedh 1y ago
        Its difficult for leadership when you are already making billions to change ship, if you are the guy who proposes it, gets approval to work on it then executes and if the plan fails you are probably out of that cushy job. So it makes sense not to rock the boat.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.
- pndy 1y ago
  Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point. Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas. The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure. Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot. Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
  - jitl 1y ago
    YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)
  - drw85 1y ago
    The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible. At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.
- zeroq 1y ago
  Ever heard the phrase "too Zune"?
- brookst 1y ago
  Both times.
someone7x 1y ago
Luckily it is immortalized in GTA5, when playing as Trevor at least. I found it the easiest phone to use in that game.
_dark_matter_ 1y ago
Totally agreed. I really enjoyed using my Windows phone! Even the tablet software was great (might still be too, but I haven't used one in years)
paxys 1y ago
For sure, so many of its features were far ahead of the competition. Sleek minimilist UX, live tiles, Qi wireless charging, kids mode, Cortana, search within settings (so simple yet no one did it at the time). Continuum let you plug your phone into a monitor and use it like a full Windows desktop (many years before Samsung Dex and other similar efforts on Android). "Universal apps" that could run on desktop/mobile/web. Sucks that Microsoft fumbled it so bad.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  its really sucks to develop windows phone at the time I guess MS really learn it lesson and go ham on opensource ecosystem if its today MS that launch windows phone, I think they can take off
  - Den_VR 1y ago
    All I really wanted from the Windows phone was the ability to pull up powershell and run some simple scripts :(
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      I don't think that's why it failed
  - attendant3446 1y ago
    Looking at the state of Windows 11, I doubt that.
  - freeone3000 1y ago
    Still no. It failed due to lack of apps. Apple and Android have twenty years of app ecosystem behind them at this point. If launched today, it will still fail due to lack of apps.
    - fakedang 1y ago
      They could if they made the same looks with an underlying Android OS, just like Huawei and all the Chinese brands which have been barred from Google Android.
keeda 1y ago
Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old. This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
- homebrewer 1y ago
  It was "efficient" by leaving almost no memory for user applications. I used two phones with 512 MBs of RAM each, one Nokia-something (620 or 625), and the other Asus-something (completely forgot the model, but it was on Android 4 and then 5). WP would offload applications from RAM as soon as you switched into another application. It was impossible to multitask — you're writing a comment on a message board, switch into a dictionary to quickly look up a word, switch back... and the state is gone. If you're lucky and the application was written correctly, you would only have to wait for 5-10 seconds before you get your half written comment back. If not (which was the norm for the stuff I used), well... The second Android phone had none of these problems, not remotely to the same degree. It was such a widespread problem that it quickly became a meme on forums.
  - no-name-here 1y ago
    It seems like iOS is still fairly aggressive in killing background apps, a dozen years after the Nokia 625? I rarely feel like I can be sure that if I go off to look something up, that I can be confident that a half-written comment will still be there when I go back to it?
  - keeda 1y ago
    Huh, interesting, I've never had good luck maintaining drafts on mobile devices so very early on I got into the habit of drafting them in something like a mail or notes app. Sometimes I still slip up and start writing drafts in an app itself and then lose them if I get distracted for a minute, though it's more often because apps are too aggressive in refreshing their feeds (the LinkedIn app being a prime example).
TheBozzCL 1y ago
Definitely my favorite phone ever was the Lumia 1020. I loved the OS, and I loved the phone itself with its focus on the camera. Sadly, I was able to get it in 2015 and by then it was too late. I don’t think any phone since then has hooked me like that.
pwthornton 1y ago
Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well. Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly). I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have. Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
- cubancigar11 1y ago
  Nobody stopped Samsung or Microsoft from supporting android apps. Virtualization is pretty much present in all the phones. The reality is that they all wanted what Apple had - a walled garden to charge exorbitant amounts. Only Google had the foresight to leverage open source (not free).
- Grazester 1y ago
  Blackberry killed Blackberry. Were you alive during that period of time or did you just read about it? Blackberry was so slow to react to the changing technology and the demand for a (decent)full touch device(the Storm 1-2 was trash). I guess BlackBerry either had their head up their ass or were afraid of killing off their biggest money maker, a phone with a Keyboard that the industry no longer wanted. By the time they had a possible candidate ready with the QNX based platform(2012) it was way too late. Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys) Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.
xattt 1y ago
My take was that Metro was flat to leverage finally-computationally-and-energy efficient scaling hardware. All design elements were simple primitives with overlaid text, with limited texturing.it was a design of the hardware of the time.
notjoemama 1y ago
You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.
fleebee 1y ago
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical. To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.

FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.

sunflowerfly 1y ago

Microsoft gave up on a phone operating system far too early.

paxys 1y ago
Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.
- DrBenCarson 1y ago
  They were already working on Windows Phone when Ballmer said that. That’s why he said it. They were targeting a lower cost segment. Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor
  - sheepscreek 1y ago
    I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?
    - microtherion 1y ago
      I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).
- sheepscreek 1y ago
  When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day. Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
  - zeroq 1y ago
    I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak. They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them. It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy. If anything, Nokia was distaster.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can not fuck things up and invent new things.
      - sumedh 1y ago
        Its difficult for leadership when you are already making billions to change ship, if you are the guy who proposes it, gets approval to work on it then executes and if the plan fails you are probably out of that cushy job. So it makes sense not to rock the boat.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.
pndy 1y ago
Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point. Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas. The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure. Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot. Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
- jitl 1y ago
  YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)
- drw85 1y ago
  The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible. At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.
zeroq 1y ago
Ever heard the phrase "too Zune"?
brookst 1y ago
Both times.

someone7x 1y ago

Luckily it is immortalized in GTA5, when playing as Trevor at least. I found it the easiest phone to use in that game.

_dark_matter_ 1y ago

Totally agreed. I really enjoyed using my Windows phone! Even the tablet software was great (might still be too, but I haven't used one in years)

paxys 1y ago

For sure, so many of its features were far ahead of the competition. Sleek minimilist UX, live tiles, Qi wireless charging, kids mode, Cortana, search within settings (so simple yet no one did it at the time). Continuum let you plug your phone into a monitor and use it like a full Windows desktop (many years before Samsung Dex and other similar efforts on Android). "Universal apps" that could run on desktop/mobile/web. Sucks that Microsoft fumbled it so bad.

tonyhart7 1y ago
its really sucks to develop windows phone at the time I guess MS really learn it lesson and go ham on opensource ecosystem if its today MS that launch windows phone, I think they can take off
- Den_VR 1y ago
  All I really wanted from the Windows phone was the ability to pull up powershell and run some simple scripts :(
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    I don't think that's why it failed
- attendant3446 1y ago
  Looking at the state of Windows 11, I doubt that.
- freeone3000 1y ago
  Still no. It failed due to lack of apps. Apple and Android have twenty years of app ecosystem behind them at this point. If launched today, it will still fail due to lack of apps.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    They could if they made the same looks with an underlying Android OS, just like Huawei and all the Chinese brands which have been barred from Google Android.

keeda 1y ago

Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old. This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)

homebrewer 1y ago
It was "efficient" by leaving almost no memory for user applications. I used two phones with 512 MBs of RAM each, one Nokia-something (620 or 625), and the other Asus-something (completely forgot the model, but it was on Android 4 and then 5). WP would offload applications from RAM as soon as you switched into another application. It was impossible to multitask — you're writing a comment on a message board, switch into a dictionary to quickly look up a word, switch back... and the state is gone. If you're lucky and the application was written correctly, you would only have to wait for 5-10 seconds before you get your half written comment back. If not (which was the norm for the stuff I used), well... The second Android phone had none of these problems, not remotely to the same degree. It was such a widespread problem that it quickly became a meme on forums.
- no-name-here 1y ago
  It seems like iOS is still fairly aggressive in killing background apps, a dozen years after the Nokia 625? I rarely feel like I can be sure that if I go off to look something up, that I can be confident that a half-written comment will still be there when I go back to it?
- keeda 1y ago
  Huh, interesting, I've never had good luck maintaining drafts on mobile devices so very early on I got into the habit of drafting them in something like a mail or notes app. Sometimes I still slip up and start writing drafts in an app itself and then lose them if I get distracted for a minute, though it's more often because apps are too aggressive in refreshing their feeds (the LinkedIn app being a prime example).

TheBozzCL 1y ago

Definitely my favorite phone ever was the Lumia 1020. I loved the OS, and I loved the phone itself with its focus on the camera. Sadly, I was able to get it in 2015 and by then it was too late. I don’t think any phone since then has hooked me like that.

pwthornton 1y ago

Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well. Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly). I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have. Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.

cubancigar11 1y ago
Nobody stopped Samsung or Microsoft from supporting android apps. Virtualization is pretty much present in all the phones. The reality is that they all wanted what Apple had - a walled garden to charge exorbitant amounts. Only Google had the foresight to leverage open source (not free).
Grazester 1y ago
Blackberry killed Blackberry. Were you alive during that period of time or did you just read about it? Blackberry was so slow to react to the changing technology and the demand for a (decent)full touch device(the Storm 1-2 was trash). I guess BlackBerry either had their head up their ass or were afraid of killing off their biggest money maker, a phone with a Keyboard that the industry no longer wanted. By the time they had a possible candidate ready with the QNX based platform(2012) it was way too late. Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys) Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.

xattt 1y ago

My take was that Metro was flat to leverage finally-computationally-and-energy efficient scaling hardware. All design elements were simple primitives with overlaid text, with limited texturing.it was a design of the hardware of the time.

notjoemama 1y ago

You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.

fleebee 1y ago

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical. To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.