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I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobi
by toast0 4mo ago
I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now.
Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere.
Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
- anonymars 4mo agoNot only that, but developing for Windows Phone 8 required using Windows 8 (which was a flop) That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive
- toast0 4mo agoWord on the street was Google didn't want to bother with WP because they worked so hard on WinCE apps and all of that was thrown away. Probably not the whole reason, but they did make an exchange connector available for gmail on wp, so it's not like they didn't support the platform at all.. YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible. I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android. If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go. [1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-sold-q2-2016/ https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...