8 ms·

Is Windows Phone Dead?

54 points by insulanian 11y ago

chrisbennet 11y ago
I wonder how the developers feel that invested in that platform?
- ct 11y ago
  The main problem IMO was the Metro UI which while different from other mobile OSes was too different. It was too cold and futuristic. Games on the platform run really slow compared to other mobile platforms. And games are the number one apps that is carrying iOS.
- ct 11y ago
  The main problem IMO was the Metro UI which while different from other mobile OSes was too different. It was too cold and futuristic. Games on the platform run really slow compared to other mobile platforms. And games are the number one apps that is carrying iOS.
- grabcocque 11y ago
  The fact that developers aren't invested in the platform is a big part of why it's living on borrowed time. They can't even get Microsoft developers invested in it; they'd rather develop for iOS first and then Android.
  - Joeri 11y ago
    I would say that microsoft supporting iOS and android much better than windows phone is the clearest signal to developers to stay away from windows phone. It's not just windows phone though. They've released office integration for WatchOS, but not for microsoft band. That's what happens when a company transitions from being a platform to being a set of apps and services.
- batou 11y ago
  I feel pretty fucked off as a user. I wouldn't invest in developing for it or universal apps for desktop either. Too many scars is the problem. Plus I no longer want to be a sharecropper. I'm waiting for this handset to be paid off and grabbing a cheap android (Moto G or something) Edit: Actually sod it I'm going to buy a dumbphone. I just did a 30 second reflection on my mobile device experience over the last decade and it hasn't even touched circa 1998 desktop software yet. I've had every platform and its just a cash sink and privacy nightmare. Edit 2: Rereading the article actually hs killed the handset for me. I know with stuff like this on the table in the near future my handset is going to be worth nothing so I just did a BIN on the last dumbphone I had on ebay (Nokia 3510i) and will shift this quickly before it depreciates to nothing.
- rwmj 11y ago
  They should have seen this coming. It's no surprise to anyone that Windows Phone has been a catastrophe with a miniscule audience, for over a decade (if you count all the MSFT phone OSes like Wince). Also any half-decent mobile phone developer should know two, maybe three platforms to reach a decent sized audience.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  One of the problems is which platform do you mean? Windows mobile, Windows phone, Phone Silverlight, WinRT, Universal apps, Windows Desktop or Windows 10?
  - Nilzor 11y ago
    Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, not quite fucked aaand not yet fucked
- Joeri 11y ago
  The problem is that there's been no gold rush to reach critical mass. There aren't enough apps to draw in users, and there aren't enough users to sustain apps (as a business). The apps which are there are lower quality and miss features, with few updates and getting fewer. I get that MS is in a tough spot. They need the apps to gain traction, but they need traction to get apps. If they'd been faster out of the gate catching up with iphone the market might have split threeways, but by now it's an entrenched duopoly and no new entrant can make a difference. I still think windows phone is better phone OS than iOS or android, but at this point the quality doesn't matter. See also: webOS, FirefoxOS. Long story short, i think MS is doing everything they can to make the platform work for developers (excellent tools, easy porting from iOS and android, universal apps), but it's just too late. They were there before iphone (windows mobile), but they didn't innovate fast enough when the iphone happened, and now it's too late.
  - Touche 11y ago
    > There aren't enough apps to draw in users, and there aren't enough users to sustain apps (as a business). All evidence suggests that apps do not influence which phone a user buys. Users install less than 1 app per month. Windows Phone is unsuccessful for other reasons.
    - justin66 11y ago
      > All evidence suggests that apps do not influence which phone a user buys. Users install less than 1 app per month. I hope you realize that the second sentence does not serve as evidence for the first, at all.
    - shinratdr 11y ago
      The problem with those kind of stats is they fold in every $0 Android device that are purchased and used essentially as glorified dumbphones. If you've ever used apps on those devices, you can plainly see why nobody would install anything onto them. I'm not going to cite average numbers of apps installed, because those stats fluctuate wildly and are typically bullshit. They also don't help substantiate usage. Windows Phone isn't only unsuccessful because of the lack of significant applications, but acting like it isn't a major factor is just being wilfully blind to reality. Microsoft can't just endlessly throw money at the problem. They can't buy their way into popularity if there is no organic momentum that follows, and there isn't. Windows Phone overall fails to make a compelling argument. But having backseat YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter clients and no SnapChat or other similarly flourishing services until it's so late nobody cares anymore is a substantial disadvantage. Finally, that statistic you chose to offer is almost irrelevant. I probably install less than one app a month on my Macs, but that doesn't mean the apps I've already installed aren't extremely important to me. Just because people aren't constantly hunting for new apps doesn't mean they don't use the ones they have. By that measure, the fact that I've only installed one password manager in five years means I don't like or use password managers. Quite the contrary, it just means I love 1Password and use it every day.
eibrahim 11y ago
I made 5 apps early on and 6 months into it I realized there was no money in it. The dev tools and environment is probably the best in mobile development. It's unfortunate they can't break through.
- frik 11y ago
  Visual Studio is good, but why does MS stick to the XML and GUIDs. e.g. XAML in WPF/Silverlight/WinPhone/WinRuntime/UnversalApp has a charm from 2005 and feels outdated. It's also used in SharePoint as data format. Reminds me of OLE2 and it's com siblings.
- tobltobs 11y ago
  My experience is just the other way round. There is some easy money if you also develop an universal app for the non phone as store. But the winrt environment is much to limited and the the dev environment is not competetive. It blows my mind how hard MS is failing in the phone market the last few years.
- beagle3 11y ago
  I think it is fortunate for the rest of the world that they can't break through. The reason Microsoft is behaving reasonably lately is exactly because they've been having problems breaking through - in fact, staying relevant - in the modern age.
- jmkni 11y ago
  I agree with you on the dev tools. That's why I would like Xamarin Forms to improve, it uses the same XAML/MVVM/C# setup that Windows Phone does, and is a joy to work with. It's just very limited at the moment.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  >dev tools and environment is probably the best in mobile development. I installed the latest Visual Studio. I think it installed about 30 applications and sprayed over 15GB of files all over my HDD. That's a pretty nasty environment. I'd rather use Android Studio from IntelliJ.
puranjay 11y ago
Windows is dying. Not just the phone. Sorry, there really is no two ways about it. This little engine can chug itself over the hill for the next few years, but it's all downhill from there. I use a Windows desktop and I constantly find myself wondering: "what am I paying MS for?". I personally like to use Word (even though it's too bloated for my needs), but clients ask for work to be in Google Docs so they can share and comment better. My Windows experience is now largely limited to opening Chrome and doing virtually everything in it. I might open up Notepad from time to time to make a quick few notes. But that's mostly out of habit, not necessity. Don't say "but I code on it". If you're a coder, you're already a specialized use case. The majority of the world simply doesn't need a bloated Windows OS to run their browsers. I'd be shorting Microsoft if I were an investor. P.S.: I was also an early Windows Phone user because I loved the UI (still the best in the business IMO). I dumped the phone after 1 year when it constantly crashed on me (Nokia Lumia 720), had terrible apps, and didn't have half the features of my friends' iPhones and Androids. It got a notification center just about two years ago. And I still can't find apps on the marketplace that aren't cheap clones.
- batou 11y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I'm sitting here on a Windows desktop at the moment and have a windows phone. See elsewhere in this thread for the fate of the phone. It's being replaced with a dumbphone. As for the desktop, I've got the following things open on it: firefox, thunderbird, PuTTY, Libreoffice Sheet, KeepassX, vim and virtualbox running Debian. Even my day job which is slaving for a Microsoft partner is moving away from their stuff. We're already on VMware ESX rather than Hyper-V, we're moving to AWS, adopting node.js and we already have a pile of Linux infrastructure floating around. A few years ago it was just propping us up but now it's actually delivering the core value for the company. We're also dumping Office 365 after only a year of subscriptions because it's a pile of shit (forefront letting stuff through, outlook sync is incredibly unreliable and the disaster that is Lync) and the euro position means a price rise. Plus over time, a VLK office license works out cheaper. But then again, do you need Office? Not really. And the final killer: we're getting completely gouged over and over again. Every time someone writes of several billion on shit investments, us enterprise customers get shafted to make up the numbers. Our SQL 2014 upgrade was stupid amounts of pain and money, so we're looking elsewhere. Postgresql is already on the cards to replace a chunk of our Web API service back ends, then they move to node, then they move to Linux. So when they "listen to the customer" what do we get? We get a pay pay pay app ecosystem that they fucked up the first time and the second time looks like a disaster, a bunch of cloud services that are completely non portable, a pile of devices which we no longer control and a bunch of backpedalling over their previous "open source is evil" attitude. There's just no reason now. They're a total fuck up of a company.
nness 11y ago
I Google'd the phrase "Windows/Microsoft is Dead" (variations there of), since I feel like that cry is made every time a new version of Windows is released or layoffs announced, etc. One of PG's posts from 2007 came up. In it I think is a quote as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago: > No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
- gbersac 11y ago
  PG is for Paul Graham and the metionned post is http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
555imon 11y ago
Windows Phone did not take off when it partnered with Nokia to sell Lumia Phones. At that time Nokia still had market share and loyal users especially in Europe and India. Despite a good OS, great dev tools and good OEM backing MSFT did not manage to get a market share of 10% be a relevant 3rd platform. It's hard to imagine how MSFT would restart a battle that has been lost some time ago.
heavymark 11y ago
Was it ever alive? Like the Firefox phone, Amazon phone and sorts, they survived on Corporate funding in general not on consumer interest. Other than Google and Apple, it's simply too late for a new party to enter the game and not only over night catch up to it's competitors but surpass them. Instead they should focus on what they are good at and integrate as well as possible with the winners such as Google and Apple. Microsoft finally understand that and is now refocusing on productivity, firefox is the little engine that could but sadly can't, amazon is trying anything to make itself profitable for investors so I don't expect them to start refocusing anytime soon.
- realusername 11y ago
  I would argue that's even harder for them than FirefoxOS because at least with FirefoxOS, it's powered by web technologies and you can have most basic apps without much work. Whereas with Windows Phone, you need actual developer time to create an application in the new ecosystem. It's already hard to convince people to port applications but it's even harder to convince them to redevelop something new entirely.
  - nivla 11y ago
    Not exactly true. You can build Web Apps for existing Windows Phone devices and Windows 10 mobile, you can import your iOS or Android apps directly to Windows app store.
    - tobltobs 11y ago
      What you are talking about? Importing iOS and Android apps into the Windows app store? There are some announcements, that this might be possible at some point in the future. But at the moment nobody knows how much modifications will be necessary for the apps to run on a windows phone.
- nivla 11y ago
  >Was it ever alive? Outside of US? Ya it was as alive as alive could be especially in Europe and Asia. I was flooded with constant adverts on TV and a good chunk of people did indeed a Windows Phone.
github-cat 11y ago
Cannot believe it. The market share of Windows Phone is even lower than Java ME. https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustomb=1 https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
coldtea 11y ago
Was it ever alive?
wordbank 11y ago
No, I'm using Lumia 830 and had 520 before. There are all basic apps and many Unity games. And Lumia 5 series are selling like hotcakes in poor countries. Windows Phone OS is smooth and fast on low-end even compared to iOS. (I'm not a MS fan, OS X is my desktop.)
dmarlow 11y ago
WP has always had an uphill climb. That's not going to change anytime soon. MS shouldn't give up on it either. I've been an early adopter and continue to use it to this day. I'm not an apple fan and don't like google either. Mobile needs MS to give an alternative in the market. I'm primarily a MS stack dev (former MS). I hear these same old MS is dying rants every few years. I don't see things going away, let alone changing anytime soon. In a few years from now their market share (desktop) may be a few percentage points lower and cynics will continue to rant. I enjoy working on the Azure/Windows platform. Most issues I've had were self inflicted.
nextweek2 11y ago
I feel sorry for those being laid off, I imagine that the next generation of Microsoft phone hardware will not be a good as the Lumia range, which is the phones main strength. The Windows Phone OS problem is that they are playing catch up, it has come a long way in a short time which has hurt App developers. But given another couple of years of stability and I think it will be on par with iOS8 and Android 5.1. Microsoft is just lowering its overheads whilst it matures the platform. By the time we get Windows 11, they'll ramp up for a big push to ISV's.

54 points by insulanian 11y ago

chrisbennet 11y ago

I wonder how the developers feel that invested in that platform?

ct 11y ago
The main problem IMO was the Metro UI which while different from other mobile OSes was too different. It was too cold and futuristic. Games on the platform run really slow compared to other mobile platforms. And games are the number one apps that is carrying iOS.
ct 11y ago
The main problem IMO was the Metro UI which while different from other mobile OSes was too different. It was too cold and futuristic. Games on the platform run really slow compared to other mobile platforms. And games are the number one apps that is carrying iOS.
grabcocque 11y ago
The fact that developers aren't invested in the platform is a big part of why it's living on borrowed time. They can't even get Microsoft developers invested in it; they'd rather develop for iOS first and then Android.
- Joeri 11y ago
  I would say that microsoft supporting iOS and android much better than windows phone is the clearest signal to developers to stay away from windows phone. It's not just windows phone though. They've released office integration for WatchOS, but not for microsoft band. That's what happens when a company transitions from being a platform to being a set of apps and services.
batou 11y ago
I feel pretty fucked off as a user. I wouldn't invest in developing for it or universal apps for desktop either. Too many scars is the problem. Plus I no longer want to be a sharecropper. I'm waiting for this handset to be paid off and grabbing a cheap android (Moto G or something) Edit: Actually sod it I'm going to buy a dumbphone. I just did a 30 second reflection on my mobile device experience over the last decade and it hasn't even touched circa 1998 desktop software yet. I've had every platform and its just a cash sink and privacy nightmare. Edit 2: Rereading the article actually hs killed the handset for me. I know with stuff like this on the table in the near future my handset is going to be worth nothing so I just did a BIN on the last dumbphone I had on ebay (Nokia 3510i) and will shift this quickly before it depreciates to nothing.
rwmj 11y ago
They should have seen this coming. It's no surprise to anyone that Windows Phone has been a catastrophe with a miniscule audience, for over a decade (if you count all the MSFT phone OSes like Wince). Also any half-decent mobile phone developer should know two, maybe three platforms to reach a decent sized audience.
tobltobs 11y ago
One of the problems is which platform do you mean? Windows mobile, Windows phone, Phone Silverlight, WinRT, Universal apps, Windows Desktop or Windows 10?
- Nilzor 11y ago
  Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, not quite fucked aaand not yet fucked
Joeri 11y ago
The problem is that there's been no gold rush to reach critical mass. There aren't enough apps to draw in users, and there aren't enough users to sustain apps (as a business). The apps which are there are lower quality and miss features, with few updates and getting fewer. I get that MS is in a tough spot. They need the apps to gain traction, but they need traction to get apps. If they'd been faster out of the gate catching up with iphone the market might have split threeways, but by now it's an entrenched duopoly and no new entrant can make a difference. I still think windows phone is better phone OS than iOS or android, but at this point the quality doesn't matter. See also: webOS, FirefoxOS. Long story short, i think MS is doing everything they can to make the platform work for developers (excellent tools, easy porting from iOS and android, universal apps), but it's just too late. They were there before iphone (windows mobile), but they didn't innovate fast enough when the iphone happened, and now it's too late.
- Touche 11y ago
  > There aren't enough apps to draw in users, and there aren't enough users to sustain apps (as a business). All evidence suggests that apps do not influence which phone a user buys. Users install less than 1 app per month. Windows Phone is unsuccessful for other reasons.
  - justin66 11y ago
    > All evidence suggests that apps do not influence which phone a user buys. Users install less than 1 app per month. I hope you realize that the second sentence does not serve as evidence for the first, at all.
  - shinratdr 11y ago
    The problem with those kind of stats is they fold in every $0 Android device that are purchased and used essentially as glorified dumbphones. If you've ever used apps on those devices, you can plainly see why nobody would install anything onto them. I'm not going to cite average numbers of apps installed, because those stats fluctuate wildly and are typically bullshit. They also don't help substantiate usage. Windows Phone isn't only unsuccessful because of the lack of significant applications, but acting like it isn't a major factor is just being wilfully blind to reality. Microsoft can't just endlessly throw money at the problem. They can't buy their way into popularity if there is no organic momentum that follows, and there isn't. Windows Phone overall fails to make a compelling argument. But having backseat YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter clients and no SnapChat or other similarly flourishing services until it's so late nobody cares anymore is a substantial disadvantage. Finally, that statistic you chose to offer is almost irrelevant. I probably install less than one app a month on my Macs, but that doesn't mean the apps I've already installed aren't extremely important to me. Just because people aren't constantly hunting for new apps doesn't mean they don't use the ones they have. By that measure, the fact that I've only installed one password manager in five years means I don't like or use password managers. Quite the contrary, it just means I love 1Password and use it every day.

eibrahim 11y ago

I made 5 apps early on and 6 months into it I realized there was no money in it. The dev tools and environment is probably the best in mobile development. It's unfortunate they can't break through.

frik 11y ago
Visual Studio is good, but why does MS stick to the XML and GUIDs. e.g. XAML in WPF/Silverlight/WinPhone/WinRuntime/UnversalApp has a charm from 2005 and feels outdated. It's also used in SharePoint as data format. Reminds me of OLE2 and it's com siblings.
tobltobs 11y ago
My experience is just the other way round. There is some easy money if you also develop an universal app for the non phone as store. But the winrt environment is much to limited and the the dev environment is not competetive. It blows my mind how hard MS is failing in the phone market the last few years.
beagle3 11y ago
I think it is fortunate for the rest of the world that they can't break through. The reason Microsoft is behaving reasonably lately is exactly because they've been having problems breaking through - in fact, staying relevant - in the modern age.
jmkni 11y ago
I agree with you on the dev tools. That's why I would like Xamarin Forms to improve, it uses the same XAML/MVVM/C# setup that Windows Phone does, and is a joy to work with. It's just very limited at the moment.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
>dev tools and environment is probably the best in mobile development. I installed the latest Visual Studio. I think it installed about 30 applications and sprayed over 15GB of files all over my HDD. That's a pretty nasty environment. I'd rather use Android Studio from IntelliJ.

puranjay 11y ago

Windows is dying. Not just the phone. Sorry, there really is no two ways about it. This little engine can chug itself over the hill for the next few years, but it's all downhill from there. I use a Windows desktop and I constantly find myself wondering: "what am I paying MS for?". I personally like to use Word (even though it's too bloated for my needs), but clients ask for work to be in Google Docs so they can share and comment better. My Windows experience is now largely limited to opening Chrome and doing virtually everything in it. I might open up Notepad from time to time to make a quick few notes. But that's mostly out of habit, not necessity. Don't say "but I code on it". If you're a coder, you're already a specialized use case. The majority of the world simply doesn't need a bloated Windows OS to run their browsers. I'd be shorting Microsoft if I were an investor. P.S.: I was also an early Windows Phone user because I loved the UI (still the best in the business IMO). I dumped the phone after 1 year when it constantly crashed on me (Nokia Lumia 720), had terrible apps, and didn't have half the features of my friends' iPhones and Androids. It got a notification center just about two years ago. And I still can't find apps on the marketplace that aren't cheap clones.

batou 11y ago
I couldn't agree more. I'm sitting here on a Windows desktop at the moment and have a windows phone. See elsewhere in this thread for the fate of the phone. It's being replaced with a dumbphone. As for the desktop, I've got the following things open on it: firefox, thunderbird, PuTTY, Libreoffice Sheet, KeepassX, vim and virtualbox running Debian. Even my day job which is slaving for a Microsoft partner is moving away from their stuff. We're already on VMware ESX rather than Hyper-V, we're moving to AWS, adopting node.js and we already have a pile of Linux infrastructure floating around. A few years ago it was just propping us up but now it's actually delivering the core value for the company. We're also dumping Office 365 after only a year of subscriptions because it's a pile of shit (forefront letting stuff through, outlook sync is incredibly unreliable and the disaster that is Lync) and the euro position means a price rise. Plus over time, a VLK office license works out cheaper. But then again, do you need Office? Not really. And the final killer: we're getting completely gouged over and over again. Every time someone writes of several billion on shit investments, us enterprise customers get shafted to make up the numbers. Our SQL 2014 upgrade was stupid amounts of pain and money, so we're looking elsewhere. Postgresql is already on the cards to replace a chunk of our Web API service back ends, then they move to node, then they move to Linux. So when they "listen to the customer" what do we get? We get a pay pay pay app ecosystem that they fucked up the first time and the second time looks like a disaster, a bunch of cloud services that are completely non portable, a pile of devices which we no longer control and a bunch of backpedalling over their previous "open source is evil" attitude. There's just no reason now. They're a total fuck up of a company.

nness 11y ago

I Google'd the phrase "Windows/Microsoft is Dead" (variations there of), since I feel like that cry is made every time a new version of Windows is released or layoffs announced, etc. One of PG's posts from 2007 came up. In it I think is a quote as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago: > No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

gbersac 11y ago
PG is for Paul Graham and the metionned post is http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

555imon 11y ago

Windows Phone did not take off when it partnered with Nokia to sell Lumia Phones. At that time Nokia still had market share and loyal users especially in Europe and India. Despite a good OS, great dev tools and good OEM backing MSFT did not manage to get a market share of 10% be a relevant 3rd platform. It's hard to imagine how MSFT would restart a battle that has been lost some time ago.

heavymark 11y ago

Was it ever alive? Like the Firefox phone, Amazon phone and sorts, they survived on Corporate funding in general not on consumer interest. Other than Google and Apple, it's simply too late for a new party to enter the game and not only over night catch up to it's competitors but surpass them. Instead they should focus on what they are good at and integrate as well as possible with the winners such as Google and Apple. Microsoft finally understand that and is now refocusing on productivity, firefox is the little engine that could but sadly can't, amazon is trying anything to make itself profitable for investors so I don't expect them to start refocusing anytime soon.

realusername 11y ago
I would argue that's even harder for them than FirefoxOS because at least with FirefoxOS, it's powered by web technologies and you can have most basic apps without much work. Whereas with Windows Phone, you need actual developer time to create an application in the new ecosystem. It's already hard to convince people to port applications but it's even harder to convince them to redevelop something new entirely.
- nivla 11y ago
  Not exactly true. You can build Web Apps for existing Windows Phone devices and Windows 10 mobile, you can import your iOS or Android apps directly to Windows app store.
  - tobltobs 11y ago
    What you are talking about? Importing iOS and Android apps into the Windows app store? There are some announcements, that this might be possible at some point in the future. But at the moment nobody knows how much modifications will be necessary for the apps to run on a windows phone.
nivla 11y ago
>Was it ever alive? Outside of US? Ya it was as alive as alive could be especially in Europe and Asia. I was flooded with constant adverts on TV and a good chunk of people did indeed a Windows Phone.

github-cat 11y ago

Cannot believe it. The market share of Windows Phone is even lower than Java ME. https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustomb=1 https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

coldtea 11y ago

Was it ever alive?

wordbank 11y ago

No, I'm using Lumia 830 and had 520 before. There are all basic apps and many Unity games. And Lumia 5 series are selling like hotcakes in poor countries. Windows Phone OS is smooth and fast on low-end even compared to iOS. (I'm not a MS fan, OS X is my desktop.)

dmarlow 11y ago

WP has always had an uphill climb. That's not going to change anytime soon. MS shouldn't give up on it either. I've been an early adopter and continue to use it to this day. I'm not an apple fan and don't like google either. Mobile needs MS to give an alternative in the market. I'm primarily a MS stack dev (former MS). I hear these same old MS is dying rants every few years. I don't see things going away, let alone changing anytime soon. In a few years from now their market share (desktop) may be a few percentage points lower and cynics will continue to rant. I enjoy working on the Azure/Windows platform. Most issues I've had were self inflicted.

nextweek2 11y ago

I feel sorry for those being laid off, I imagine that the next generation of Microsoft phone hardware will not be a good as the Lumia range, which is the phones main strength. The Windows Phone OS problem is that they are playing catch up, it has come a long way in a short time which has hurt App developers. But given another couple of years of stability and I think it will be on par with iOS8 and Android 5.1. Microsoft is just lowering its overheads whilst it matures the platform. By the time we get Windows 11, they'll ramp up for a big push to ISV's.