15 ms·

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.

cm2187 9y ago
I remember they started by introducing the same sort of toll than Apple. That was them shooting themselves in the foot.
- dhimes 9y ago
  This is what I thought too. If they're also going to charge in the ballpark of 30%, then they're not serious. They're not giving the proper incentive.
aloisdg 9y ago
I used to be a MSP from Mango to WP8.1. I will always be impress by everything MS did for devs and students. If you have the will to build an app, you could have, to help you, free licenses, free marketplace, free phone and tablet to test, free ms dev time to help you, free commercial time to help you share you app, free press coverage, free conferences, etc. They did so much, sometimes I felt impostor to don't do more. So much money was here to support.
nathantotten 9y ago
This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement of that app and other flagship apps was not a core focus. Work was outsourced and not given enough resources. Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. From my prospective the focus was on filling the store with apps regardless of quality. This convinced the first generation of Microsoft loyalists to buy Windows Phones, but turned off many of those people. Most would not go on to buy a second WP or recommend them to friends and family. This includes many (dare I say most) Microsoft employees who where enthusiastic about the product at first, but when it came time to buy a second or third device moved on to Android or iPhone.
- nova22033 9y ago
  >Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    On the other hand, if all WP has is half-baked clones of better apps on Android/iOS, there's even less incentive to switch over. If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)
  - nathantotten 9y ago
    You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2]. To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people. If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow. Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dollars-windows-phone-7/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-200-million-for-windows-phone-marketing-push/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...
wslh 9y ago
If you really want to build a platform and developers didn't come you should build part of the software youself or pay third parties.
- addicted 9y ago
  That was Apple's strategy. They built some really great Mac OS X apps when they were the underdog, and offered them for free with the hardware. They also built (and bought) some great Pro apps which attracted a ton of customers. The iLife suite and even the iWork suite to some extent (I loved Keynote in college) were essential to me making the switch.
spoiledtechie 9y ago
Im still on the platform. I was holding out, hoping for something. But I guess my current phone will be my last windows phone. Sad.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I'm still on the platform as well (typing this on a Lumia 635). To be honest I only bought it as I wanted a cheap smartphone but it's served me very well. I don't really use that many apps (Baconit and Metrotube are the two I use the most), but the WinPhone 8.1 UI is probably the best phone UI I've ever used (I prefer it over iOS and Android). Thankfully I've already got my next phone lined up (Librem 5).
- mattnewport 9y ago
  Me too, guess I'm going to have to make this phone last until another alternative to iOS and Android appears. I've preordered a Purism Librem 5 as part of their crowd funding campaign so hoping maybe that comes to something.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  The platform will still be supported, but new hardware or features won't be coming, which is fine with me. If anything, I'll stick with MS for now and then switch to IOS sometime in the next few years. You can still get the new HP Elite X3 and the Lumia 950 and 950XL on ebay for around $300.
MiddleEndian 9y ago
I loved the UI, design, consistency, etc. I liked it because it was straightforward and rarely notified me about anything. I left because of w10m specifically. They took away the consistency. It felt as janky as Android does. After I dropped and broke my last WP8 device, I had to decide whether I wanted to order another old WP8 phone online or just switch to Android. I switched to Android. It's not nearly as nice as WP8 was but what can you do?
shanev 9y ago
Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.
- spoiledtechie 9y ago
  10k seems reasonable enough to port it. Why didn't you?
  - herbst 9y ago
    For everything else than a small local app that is not exactly a very eye opening offer IMO. Think about the learning time for the completely new eco system. The new hardware and software that is needed costs money as well.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    How can you say that without knowing 1) what the app is and 2) what tools it was built with? There's also the problem of ongoing maintenance on multiple platforms. In the best case, it was written with a dual platform toolkit (iOS and Android) and MS adds a 3rd platform to that toolkit to make it easy to port and maintain all three. Even if that were all true, it's won't be for every developer and you'll still have problems bringing people to the platform.
    - shanev 9y ago
      1) http://www.drumkit.co http://www.drumkit.co 2) Built in Objective-C with a custom audio engine in C++. Audio latency on Android was horrible at that time, MS was probably worse. It would have been a terrible app on those platforms if I did port it. This was before cross-platform toolkits existed. It needed to be a native app with low level access audio to hardware. I wasn't going to make an app where you tap a drum and wait 100ms to hear a sound.
      - kpxxx 9y ago
        > MS was probably worse. Not that this counters anything you said nor that relevant to this topic, but as a nerd I am genuinely curious if this was true. I used to write lowlat audio stuff for iOS so I was well aware of the situation Android vs iOS (and because of my large interest in audio Android in general always makes me puke in my mouth a little -- like it is one of those neat little hidden indicators that while Apple is a hardware company, Google is fundamentally an ad company -- they really don't give a shit other than prioritizing ad delivery). Anyway, Windows itself obviously has solid low-lat audio services, was it really that bad in the mobile stuff?
jetti 9y ago
I had a Windows Phone 7 and loved it but ended up not being able to afford the monthly payments at the time that was required for having a smart phone. I didn't have much of an app issue but that was because I didn't have the phone long enough. I have a co-worker that also had a Windows phone as his previous phone and liked it. He wanted to get another when it was time to upgrade but he couldn't, there just wasn't any available.
ransom1538 9y ago
"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem" Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin. https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-apps-are-actually-used/ https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...
- jk2323 9y ago
  Whatsapp? WeChat? Ueber? Ofo? Tinder? I hardly use my phone for calls. In fact, I prefer Whatsapp or Wechat. And nope, I don't have netflix on my phone.
- jsight 9y ago
  Yeah, I think that the focus on apps might have actually been part of their problem. How many consumers really saw anything about the platform that made it more appealing than competing platforms? Without a solid killer feature as a differentiator, the apps wouldn't matter. I'm sure that it made a great measurable and a great excuse for failure, though. I don't doubt that the internal narrative would focus on that.
- arkades 9y ago
  Your post and his comment do not contradict one another. Or rather, your interpretation of the data in that post is shaky. Consistent with the data presented in that post: -I download lots of one-time-use apps. They're useful, and I won't use a phone without them, and then uninstall them in a week (eg, city specific apps when traveling) - I download lots of special use apps that contribute few app-hours most of the time, but are super critical when I need them (hiking apps when hiking, service-specific references when I'm working in the relevant department, etc) -I download games (lots of them), play with them for a while, and then uninstall for a new game. Yeah, most are gone in a week or a month, but the ongoing process is valuable to me. (Edit addendum: -I have apps I use quasi-frequently and that contribute very few app-hours of interaction, but are still valuable. Eg, the couple minutes a day I use a task list, the five minutes a week I use FreshDirect, etc.) And then, yes, there are a handful of core apps that get most of my usage (outlook, kindle, Netflix, messages, safari). This is entirely consistent with those stats, and still places enormous value on the app ecosystem.
rqs 9y ago
> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software) I don't love the design, but I like it. Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen. Yes, there are some bad designs in the Windows 10 Mobile, but all of them are fixable. And once those problems get fixed, it will be gorgeous. I feel very sad about their current failure, and I don't think simply give up is a good choose.
- pm90 9y ago
  Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be something that they just can't get right about mobile OS (or probably its simply the fact that the market doesn't have space enough for yet another proprietary OS). MS will do a lot better if it focuses on making android betters, supporting .NET apps in android (yay Mono!). Maybe in the future they could revisit the mobile OS thing and have better luck then but for the near future it looks very unlikely. The mark of a good company is adaptability. Intel went from RAM chip maker to creating microprocessors, MS itself went from creating BASIC compilers to making OS's. With Azure, .NET, Office, Windows etc. I think they have enough areas to make money off. Its just their strategy of adapting windows to mobile devices didn't work.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I only see a value on .NET apps on Android for those companies planning to do both iOS and Android, or re-using existing .NET code. For those just targeting Android, specially given the global market share, they are better off with plain Java/Kotlin + NDK, than adding yet another layer to debug and extra APK size.
    - izacus 9y ago
      ".NET apps on Android/iOS" are actually a very popular thing - the framework is just named Xamarin instead of .NET.
godzillabrennus 9y ago
They even held a funeral for their competitors devices: https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-windows-phone-7-rtm-with-funeral-parade-for/ https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-win... This didn't age well.
- golfer 9y ago
  Microsoft has been tone deaf about a lot of things... This is a prime example. Not a lot of self awareness on their part. This was cringe worthy.
- cubano 9y ago
  Without a doubt this stunt marked the absolute death knell for WP...my God the arrogance of those people.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  That is sickeningly hilarious.
- elsurudo 9y ago
  Heh. I was an intern there when this happened. In fact I think I was in the float in front of this one. To be honest this was blown out of proportion a bit. It was an internal celebration of release, and each team picked a theme. Most in good fun. In retrospect the funeral themed-one... yeah... didn't age well, and was perhaps in bad taste (I can't recall which team this was). It was just a bunch of overworked PMs, devs, and testers having some fun and blowing off steam.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  The walk of shame.
- Dragonai 9y ago
  Goodness gracious.
- pweissbrod 9y ago
  I'll file that next to the windows 7 release party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
jk2323 9y ago
It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.
- brohee 9y ago
  That doesn't make much sense, apps made for mouse and keyboard on a large screen won't magically become usable on a small touchscreen...
  - macintux 9y ago
    That's always been a weakness with Microsoft's strategy. First with a stylus for Windows Mobile, later with the ribbon in Office.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  That UX will just be amazing
- criddell 9y ago
  > Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything? I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don't think they can compete.
  - Const-me 9y ago
    > Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view Windows is way ahead in both security and power efficiency. About security, here’s an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410833 In Windows, clipboard access was restricted to foreground app since WP7. About power efficiency, WP is very restrictive on what apps can do in background. See this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh202942(v=vs.105).aspx#BKMK_ConstraintsforallScheduledTaskTypes https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh2029...
mgkimsal 9y ago
> For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc I remember some of this vaguely. A friend of mine deep in the MS world was showing me some of what was going on, but this "ran promotions" - I dunno. I don't think I'm way out in "non-MS" land - I keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of tech communities. I didn't hear much about this except from a few friends deeply entrenched in MS. Perhaps there wasn't enough of an outreach program? > Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. Given that I've registered multiple times with them to download various SDKs in the past, perhaps... emailing me about what they were doing, because I might have had an interest in being part of that app development push? Maybe some actual ads on non-MS tech-related websites, or outreach to local non-MS user groups might have helped? As someone who's run multiple local tech groups, and frequented many for years, this "big focus of microsoft" was never a blip on anyone's radar (AFAICR). > giving away free phones That's sort of the bare minimum you'd need to do. I'm reminded a bit about the HP tablets with webOS. They charged $499 (because, IIRC, "that's the price for tablets" - because of iPads), sold for a few weeks, then discontinued. Loads of people picked them up at $150-$200, even with no apps. "Well, we can't win, let's close it all down", after spending $1B+ on acquiring the stuff they're giving up on in the first place.
- mobilio 9y ago
  I remember that story for tablets. Same was with Amazon Fire Phone. But i don't know how you can write off $1B... because honestly even iPod or iPhone wasn't successfully from the beginning. So they invest years for that status. Competitors make clones, release them and after two months declaring abandoning market. Totally non-sence for me!
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    What's so weird about... well. not weird - just stupid(?). The HP thing - the guy in charge who made those decisions left soon after, IIRC (maybe was forced out, but didn't sound like it). You spend $1B acquiring palm for webOS, but don't want to invest any more in actually trying to market or develop developers? They flew off the shelves at $150/bucks, even with knowing there's no support, etc. Hobbyists wanted them. Some of my friends and family wanted one. I couldn't justify $500, but could $200 (but couldn't get any at that price). Let's say they'd sold them at a loss - let's say $149, and they were losing $50 on each one. Getting 2 million of those in people's hands in a year would have 'cost' $100m, but ... the ecosystem would have had a reason to grow, because there would have been a market to serve. Had discussions with folks who claimed "you can't do that" (for some reason, bringing "dumping" and "illegality" in to the argument). So... selling them at $150 while "going out of business" is AOK, but selling that at $150, taking a loss while trying to grow a market (and creating more long term value for the people buying them) "makes no sense" (that was one of the arguments I got from folks). Of course, it's all academic, and I'm just armchair quarterbacking the whole thing, but few companies even have the option of strategic long term losses to seed/grow a market. I'd think the rewards would be substantial if you can pull it off, but we don't seem to have many who want to try anymore, and that lack of trying really cements the two-party system we have in mobile.
marindez 9y ago
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text. That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your numbers.
- distances 9y ago
  Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve. And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".
  - at-fates-hands 9y ago
    I remember a co-worker who would scan the latest IOS apps and then install them and demonstrate them at lunch for us. One day he was really happy with his latest download: A "softserve poop" app. The other one was a "virtual bong hit" app. But yeah, lots of bloatware and apps that were worthless, but could hold your attention for a few minutes until you uninstalled it.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
I really would love to see a Microsoft mobile device. My issue was lack of available devices on my carrier, and when I did find them they hardly were competitive with the available Android alternatives. I hope Microsoft does return to the Mobile OS market, but I hope they pull all the right moves off to get real traction going. I still remember having a code to be a Windows developer for free as a student but never had the time to build any apps so I never took advantage of my developer code. I do hope Microsoft returns back at it someday. I hope they bring out "Super Phones" on every major carrier that truly compete. Also hope they don't bring some of the pain points of Windows 10 (forced updates, forced telemetry and what not). Google and Apple need a serious competitor. Ubuntu bailed and I wish they had not. It seems like a very specialized OS needs to be built and it needs to hit market on all major carriers with new things to offer that are worthwhile. Privacy would be a strong selling point if anyone else attempts it. I want a privacy focused and open source mobile alternative, feels like I'll wait a long time for it though. Microsoft has the resources to provide such an alternative though... Would be definitely different if they went that route.
- ygra 9y ago
  Being able to compete is mostly having an app platform on par with iOS or Android. Precisely the point where Windows Phone is lacking. This is a situation I don't see changing, especially not without hardware. Furthermore, releasing a phone with good hardware at a competitive price point means either losing money to push into the market (which I think MS has done the past few years with their mobile offerings), or having a supply chain to have good hardware at a low-enough price (something which Apple and Samsung already have). I kinda doubt there will be a good third mobile option again. The choices currently are to target iOS to make money, or Android to reach more users and for most apps there's isn't much point in supporting anything else. Plus, there aren't that many apps built upon frameworks that would allow easy addition of a third build target. There also doesn't seem to be much point in offering an open-source mobile platform. The partners you need to convince to offer phones with your platform don't care (much) whether it's open-source or proprietary. In Android's case the open-source-ness pretty much only matters for Amazon and a tiny fraction of users that install custom builds. Google has certainly tried to wrestle as much control of the platform back, both for control reasons, and to be able to provide a better user and update experience (Things a hardware vendor won't care much about. They make money when you buy the phone, not when you use it.).
mjw1007 9y ago
A couple of years ago we sent two people to a meeting at Microsoft to talk about a port of an existing Android/iOS app. The work was already funded so we were really just hoping for a free phone or two. The report I heard back was that they treated it as an opportunity to try to sell us Office 365. (The port never happened because the client's plans to roll out Windows phone to their staff fell through some time later.)
philliphaydon 9y ago
The problem with windows phone / mobile is not the apps. It was Microsoft. When Apple launches an Phone, it’s avaliable world wide. When Microsoft launches a phone, it’s avaliable in America. My last windows phone was a Lumia 925, the last Lumia announced I waited 7 months for it to reach singapore before throwing in the towel and going android. There were no phones avaliable outside America, uk, Australia. Now I use iPhone. I have no sympathy for Microsoft in regards to it’s phone biz because it didn’t try to break the market.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This. I knew everyone from seniors, the a police chief, to tech folks carrying Windows phones. The apps we needed were there. But Microsoft had a nearly-useless approach to hardware releases, they constantly missed the boat. I currently carry the last Windows Mobile phone on Verizon (the US' largest carrier). It is from 2014. (Actually, a new Elite x3 is coming out next week, three years later.) This is ridiculous. When the Elite x3 originally came out, we wondered what insanity was someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users. We didn't need apps, we needed phones.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users Whose fault is this though? Was it missing a particular radio band, or was it anti-competitive behaviour by Verizon? I'm used to just buying phones and slipping in the SIM.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Verizon has a certification process, but they are effectively required by law to accept all compatible phones. Microsoft didn't even submit any of their recent phones for Verizon certification, even if they had chips which supported Verizon bands. Actually, HP is just now (like, this month) releasing a version of the Elite x3 that is Verizon-certified. https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/get-certified https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/get-certified https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase/device/4916 https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase/...
jbigelow76 9y ago
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. The one thing MS didn't try to incentivize independent app developers was to eliminate the 30% revenue cut MS would take on the sale of paid apps. I always thought it would have been a good differentiation as there were always complaints that it was getting too hard to for indies to make it in the iOS app store. Even if MS would have said they were waiving the commission during an introductory period of a few years it might have helped. It seemed penny wise, pound foolish to think they could charge the same skim that Apple does.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  I recall they announced promotions like that as well. At one point I recall they would auto-cut at least in half for some amount of time if your app was chosen for the front page of the Store. Since the Anniversary Update last year, sideloading has been enabled by default, too, if you wanted to sell apps outside the store, and that didn't magically attract indies either.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Sideloading is a thing on Android too, but it really doesn't attract a lot of devs or users. Most users stick to the stores, cause they don't want to go chase down and give their payment info to infinity different sites.
- tomaskafka 9y ago
  Not sure it would have helped. Any rational high-profile dev will compute that 70 % * 100 000 downloads is better that 100 % of 1000 downloads.
  - rodorgas 9y ago
    Sure, but it's not like they have to choose one or another. And 100% of 1000 downloads is better than 70% of 1000 downloads.
deleted 9y ago
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shubhamjain 9y ago
> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem. From my experience, that wasn't the case. I didn't own a Windows Phone but one of my friends did. According to him, what forced him to move was an overload of animations which became very irritating. I can recall a comment that suggested how Windows phone exploited animations to cover the fact that it was too slow.
- usaphp 9y ago
  Yep, that’s exactly the reason why I hated it. Those animations looked nice at first but after a while they get so annoying and even launching a dialer took much longer than needed because of those flight animations. Also I did not like the flat look and flat colors. All the apps looked the same, so did the icons. The best thing about App Store on iOS was the colorful variety of apps where each of them had a unique distinct look and it was a joy to expolore new wild apps on the marketplace.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Several of my friends and I loved Windows phone and I hate Windows (prefer Linux). Sounds weird, but I've always thought Windows Phone to be more elegant than Android.
- throwaway613834 9y ago
  That's very true for Windows Phone. The animations definitely got irritating.
- nathanasmith 9y ago
  Back in 2011, I bought an HTC HD7 from a friend who switched back to Android. I was very impressed by how fast Windows Phone 7 was especially the ultra-smooth scrolling. But, like you said, the animations were enough to drive you nuts. Way too much, I don't know what to call it, "swoopy" maybe. It was enough to make you dizzy. I ended up trading the phone for a Galaxy S and that was the end of Windows Phone for me.
winphoneappdev 9y ago
Having done my fair share of windows phone app development (8.0, 8.1, 10) I can confirm. Microsoft incentivized app development, and paid top game development companies millions and gave them featured placements for their half-assed windows phone ports. And then as a regular joe you would actually put in the effort* to get things working well. Then you would watch these bug-plagued big name 3-star ports appear out of nowhere and usurp you on the top free lists and search results due to their favorable placements. And then you would move on to a fairer market, and when microsoft stopped paying them, the big app developers did too (not that they ever updated or fixed the bugs on windows phone releases.) * Difficult as windows phone was the only mobile platform not supporting openGL in hardware and the top sold windows phones were incredibly low spec.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.
  - dc443 9y ago
    Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that... They could do it, though. They could.
    - ClassyJacket 9y ago
      They might not remove it any time soon, but they could easily never update it.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      They already re-wrote most all relevant graphics APIs including the macOS compositor to use Metal as backend. All major middleware engines already support Metal as well, and relevant companies like Adobe are using it as well. Even if they don't officially drop GL, they could just leave it on life support, similarly to Carbon APIs.
    - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
      They are definitely not helping. They promote SceneKit and Metal over all else. Granted Metal is WAY better than OpenGL
sametmax 9y ago
They tried everything, except for open standards, foss, focus on user privacy or anything that would have have made them different.
- jimmies 9y ago
  That is pretty much the reason I didn't have a Windows phone. I would have considered it if it actually did promise privacy. Free phone sounds nice, but tinkerers like me don't want to apply and get the approval lottery for shit. We wanted cheap phones. The Android ecosystem at that time was already matured to the point that you can get cheap no frills, no worries if you break it secondhands. It was an obvious choice when I could get a secondhand Android phone with all the stuff I could tinker with for $100, and that also gave me the unexplored freedom to get any ROM I want. I remember porting Cyanogenmod 9 on my shitty 2 year old OG Motorola Droid, and control every aspect of it.
JamesBarney 9y ago
I stopped using the windows for the same reason. I loved that I could buy a performant phone for $50 when my $200 Android feels sluggish. But I hated not having any apps. Specifically I hated all the shitty apps that had flooded the app store because of their half baked promotions. All of their promotions incentivized churning out a bunch of shitty apps. Like paying people $100 per app, this created a lot of crap in the app store to wade through to find quality apps. Instead they should have matched revenue or paid an extra 5 cents per download. Something to incentivize a dev to write one good app instead of 5 throw away apps.
Spooky23 9y ago
They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones. The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms. O365 is a great example... the office platform should be an amazing mobile platform that drives all sorts of interesting things. But as an O365 customer, Microsoft just uses it as a lever to push their MDM product (you cannot configure Office apps without Microsoft stuff). MDM is a pure commodity play. Microsoft would rather made $4.99 month on Intune than capture business process on their platform, which is worth 10x more. Meanwhile Apple treats everyone pretty equally, and you can actually get stuff done. I said this 20 years ago and it is still true today... Microsoft should spin off Office, server and client into different companies. Office could be an exponentially more valuable cash cow without being dragged down by the shitshow of Windows. Windows on client is a legacy product providing solutions to problems that people don’t have. Office is fundamentaly a more valuable platform. Where I work, PC users spend more time in Outlook any other application. Browser and Word account for about 50% and 25% less time on average. So why are we presenting this UI optimized for computing circa 1997 where people run lots of little apps? Apple got this right by making iOS very low touch.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Outlook+Exchange is really the thing keeping Microsoft alive.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    For now. Some of the younger people aren't having any of that shit these days.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      If they work at any big enterprise it is either Outlook or Lotus Notes. The latter will make them love Outlook.
arenaninja 9y ago
I bought someone a Windows phone and they had the same feedback - big name apps not available (whatsapp, instagram, etc.) I wanted to buy a Windows phone since I use none of these apps, but there was no hardware refresh or major announcements around Windows phones and that deterred me. I don't understand how MS went on to a successful Surface and failed phones, I would think they're similar markets - hype-driven, takes a few iterations to get right, etc. I bought the Google G2 and it was far from what an Android phone is today, but Windows phones seem to run on a no-upgrade strategy which is strange
- cjsuk 9y ago
  I think that's close to the truth but really there has never been any product direction or commitment from MSFT. why would you build a product on that? Surface isn't successful. It's a disaster. Just a well covered up one so far. Give it a couple of years and it'll be down the toilet as well. Consumer Reports dumped on them last year with a 25% failure rate within 2 years. Rather than deal with this, they go into denial and market market market mode. The problem is that they're building products they want, not what the user wants. And when the user asks for something, they just say NOTHING and drown out all the negativity with blogs and hype and pointless communication paths to pacify the users who are pissed off. On top of all that there is this personality cult around Satya where everyone is saying he's the second coming, the saviour and all that junk. Turns out that it's blinded marketing, the enterprise customers are getting shafted (me) and footing the bill for cock up after cock up after cock up. Quality is gone. Privacy is gone. No one says anything. Everyone is voting with their feet. Same turd of a company as ever.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.
  - arenaninja 9y ago
    Yes I imagine some of these exist now, I purchased that device some years ago now
teekert 9y ago
I loved it too, but my Nokia Lumia 800 never got updated. Loved the flow of things, it was fast, Whatsapp worked basically all I needed. But I did feel screwed as an early adopter. Why was I never able to run APKs? That would have helped so much...
pwdisswordfish 9y ago
I loved my Lumia 920, and if only there were apps, I would not be using iPhone right now. Major things I've missed that were available on android/iOS: banking app - some other banks had an app for WP, but I didn't want to switch banks public transit route planner - there were some, iOS and android had THE app for my city with really good bus arrival estimates official public transit app - I couldn't buy tickets from my phone official city parking app - had to go to parking teller and pay there in friggin cash, now I just set the zone and am done with it even the most popular taxi app was not available Hearthstone - I like this rng card game
- zyme 9y ago
  I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast. My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same. A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost. Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win. Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...
dtx1 9y ago
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it. Then windows 10 came and it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. The Live-Tiles got even worse since you couldn't programm them like the windows 8 ones. Just a whole mess. Couple that with the hillariously bad store interface (backend aswell as frontend) and 0 User engagement and it was bound to fail (as will all UWP apps) You guys build a, I'm sorry to say but after 3 years of frustration it's fair to say, half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android, restricted the developers unecessarily, broke compatibility once a year requiring a complete rewrite and frankly build a product that only microsoft liked but was universally hated by their users. It's a story of too little too late and a whole lot of arrogance on microsofts side. Oh and don't even get me started on microsoft completely ignoring the european market where they actually got up to 15% marketshare of new devices sold for a while.
- narrator 9y ago
  The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    Yes. They also rewrite stuff half way through and tell you it's the same project just to piss you off. Windows Workflow and Windows Communication Foundation for example. I'm really disinclined to invest in any of their technology because my headspace is finite and I want to deliver business value, not change the unworn carpets once a year.
toast0 9y ago
The lack of apps was annoying at time, but what made me leave was probably Microsoft Edge. The rendering was clearly better than IE, but Edge would crash my phone, or become non responsive, or both so often (creators update on Lumia 640 LTE). If the browser doesn't work, and there are no apps, it doesn't make sense to have the phone.
- JamesUtah07 9y ago
  I don't understand why Microsoft has keep IE/Edge around. It's just embarrassing. Event my technology illiterate friends and family rag on IE and everyone installs chrome these days. If they spend less time building IE and focused on other platforms they'd waste a lot less time for everyone including themselves.
  - toast0 9y ago
    Well, when Mozilla wanted to build Firefox for Windows Mobile, Microsoft told them no. If they removed IE/Edge, they would have no browser for the deployed windows mobile devices. :P
  - jhbadger 9y ago
    They need it for the same reason Apple needs Safari. And why the European Union needs their GPS competitor Galileo. It's dangerous to put all your trust into a tool controlled by a competitor, even if they are playing nice with you at the moment.
  - zyme 9y ago
    They need something built into the OS that supports HTML/HTML5, its what a lot of system interfaces and apps especially internet based ones like to be build from. Plus how would you download another windows browser - it would have to be in the app store first lol.
jhasse 9y ago
You know what would have been an incentive for me (and I guess thousand of other game devs) to support windows phone? Support for OpenGL ES.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS? Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    > So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS? No, I will continue using OpenGL ES. Anyway: Apple can afford pushing it's own API due to market share, Microsoft could not. > Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP. I know, but it didn't support a feature I needed at the time and also it was quite a hassle. Together with the non-GCC/Clang compiler it was just too much.
flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
>they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. Is anyone else surprised that "giving away free windows phones" was not a recipe for success in terms of incentivising capable app developers? Most every app developer already owns their favorite phone because they can afford it.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Most apps make a pittance.
  - flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
    What does that have to do with anything?
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I think the idea that app developers are all loaded is highly suspect.
      - flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
        Sure, but Microsoft doesn't want to incentivize people who write mediocre apps that make no money to write apps for their app store. They want to incentivize people to write apps that bring in the big bucks. So they can get a cut.
- nashashmi 9y ago
  They should have also given away free phones to end users. And for the other users who bought stuff, they should have given them 100$ of credit to buy apps. And then periodically rewarded great users with 100$. it would have been like a tax break for the users to spur the app economy.
guftagu 9y ago
Yeah, I won a WOWZAPP competition by making an HTML5 game in 2 days, wrapping it up in a Windows 8 app and publishing it to store. I got a Lumia 800 for it which ran Windows phone 7. When they already had Windows 8 devices out and the competition was to make Windows 8 apps. I still don't know what they expected me to do with this obsolete phone. That phone was useless to me because there were literally no apps on the Windows 7 store. When I tried to sell it few days later, no one was even willing to consider it and I had to sell it for peanuts.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
My wife complains bitterly that she is unable to keep her Windows phone. I wonder sometimes if this ecosystem was killed by "expectation disease" where success was defined as '1/3 the market or better'. It is a common problem of insecure BigCorp type thinking when trying to break into a market, it has killed Google in the social space. This is the kind of issue that really needs a 'peanut butter factory'[1] approach. [1] The 'peanut butter factory' has been a silicon valley euphemism for a small team of engineers from a "big" company that have gone off to build a new project without having the big company drag them down.
r00fus 9y ago
Did they do what Apple did and setup a seed fund to get startups ready to compete with the big platforms? See iFund (2008): https://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/06/ifund-to-offer-100-million-in-seed-money-to-iphone-developers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/06/ifund-to-offer-100-mill... The fact is, you should incentivize funders/investors, not developers. The developers will follow if they have a hot new startup where they can (potentially) mint money using your seed capital. However, I agree this only works if you aren't seriously late to the party.
fpig 9y ago
Windows phones themselves are fine. But two things were massive failures: 1. Microsoft created development tools that are not appropriate for real-world use cases and tried to push that on devs and companies, which failed spectacularly. The demand for apps which work on Windows desktop and Windows phone literally doesn't exist. It doesn't matter that Microsoft would have loved it if people built apps like that. If there is no demand for such apps they don't get built (and they didn't). You get garbage (compared to WPF or even WinForms) "metro" or whatever you call them now desktop apps that are intensely hated by Windows users and you get a WP app that you can't reuse to build an iOS or Android app... The UI was also completely different so you couldn't even really reuse much of the design. So no code sharing, no design sharing. What .NET devs wanted was a way to build apps using C# that work on all mobile platforms (we never cared about a mobile app working on desktop). If you had given us that you would have had your apps purely by virtue of piggybacking on iOS, Android and .NET popularity. We complained about the retarded "multiplatform within the Windows ecosystem" approach from day 1 yet Microsoft released several iterations (not backwards-compatible, of course, so they were losing some devs each time) of this garbage before finally listening to the market and embracing Xamarin at which point it no longer mattered as WP was a joke. A LOT of people love C# and are willing to jump through hoops to develop multiplatform apps with it. XAML is also very cool. Microsoft had that part in the bag, yet completely failed to use this to their advantage. Imagine if when WP7 (or even WP8) was released Microsoft was able to say "here, you can now develop mobile apps in C# and they will also build for iOS and Android!" .NET devs would have jizzed in their pants. 2. Microsoft threw the existing WP users in the trash with WP7 -> WP8. My iPhone updated for like 7 years through god knows how many iOS versions. When I bought a new one, it felt almost exactly the same except faster due to better hardware. People were wary of buying a WP because they got burned once.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Wrong. Take a look at another platform that Microsoft pushed into: game consoles. How did they break into game consoles? They bought an entire game studio, Bungie, and produced one of the most best selling games of all time (Halo) as an exclusive title. Nothing Microsoft did with Windows phone was on remotely the same scale. The fact that a movie of that scale would have been vastly more costly than the acquisition of Bungie and development of Halo is merely an indication of the fact that MS waited too long, not that nothing could be done.
Sephr 9y ago
There's an obvious incentive they haven't tried: guaranteeing a lower app store margin like 1-2% instead of the 30% cut that Microsoft currently takes. Google and Apple have already convinced a sufficient number of users users that their app stores are essential, so they can continue to charge whatever they like. Microsoft didn't have the same luxury, so they needed to change this. They never made the change and it's too late now, but I think if they did this a few years ago they would be in a better position.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  A good amount of the "key apps" are free anyway, so a lower margin wouldn't have helped there.
ghthor 9y ago
The best thing a new phone platform could do is essentially create an App building framework like React Native that allows developers to build apps targeting the new platform and the existing platforms at the same time(maybe not as a first class citizen initially, but those platform devs and fill in the blanks). That's about the only way that, as an engineer, I"m going to give a shit about developing for your app platform. If I care, and I make cool apps, then the user base size doesn't matter, I'll still target it because it makes my life better as a developer.
Buttes 9y ago
It's almost like if you shit on developers for a decade people don't wanna bother with your new platform.
nunez 9y ago
Which is a real damn shame because WP was such a fine OS and was the REAL competitor to the iPhone in terms of UX and hardware design (Lumia line).
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Microsoft decided that a great way to get apps for their phone would be to make a UI for both desktop and phone and force developers to use it. In a single stroke they alienated all their existing desktop developers while forcing potential phone app developers to have to think about far more complex problems. Their message to developers was that they must learn something new. And so they did. XCode.
pbarnes_1 9y ago
Nope. We're a mid-size SaaS app and not a single person from MS made any sort of overture to us apart from "you should develop for Windows Phone!". It would have cost us like 100-200k and 9-12 months of developer time to do this. And then again for 10. And provide support for the rest of time. Nope! We laughed at them in the background and awaited its eventual death. That we didn't put a single second of effort into developing for this platform has finally been vindicated! :) Forcing devs to rewrite stuff every major release made it pretty clear no one there cared about developers.
IgorPartola 9y ago
I wonder what would have happened if they competed on pure price. Like if they basically gave away 10m devices. That’s a small amount but it could have kickstarted something. App developers have to choose which platforms to support. The cost is nearly doubled if you go from just one to both dominant platforms. Adding a third would nearly triple it. It is not worth it if suddenly you can reach a whole lot of people. Going after developers is good if there isn’t a market already. Going after consumers might have created a critical mass where developers would have just showed up on their own. Maybe a campaign to hand a new Windows phone to every college kid on campus would have worked. College kids aren’t flush with spending money, so a free phone would be a boon. But college kids also graduate and get jobs, making future phone purchases a possibility. Plus college kids tend to be trend setters for technology in situations like this. Eh, I am rambling. People much smarter than me have probably already thought of this.
- pxeboot 9y ago
  They practically did. I bought a Windows phone for $30 a couple years ago.
  - zyme 9y ago
    That's how much my mom's Lumia 640-LTE cost a few years ago - I think right after it was first released. Such a good price for the hardware if only it could run something useful, the latest 10 Mobile build does count...
pilsetnieks 9y ago
I got a Lumia 820 that way. I loved that OS and I'm sad it never got the recognition it deserved. If nothing else, a serious competitor to the other two major OSs with such radically different design might inspire Apple and Google to something beyond the tired old icons on a grid.
rodorgas 9y ago
I think Microsoft could greatly improve developer support. I've sent my Edge extension in April and still have no response.
dethswatch 9y ago
It was the first phone I'd bought in 7 years that didn't let you add your own ringtones. That's how far behind it was. I didn't get copy/paste for about a year. It's like you guys were -trying- to cargo-cult the iphone. Unfortunately, Belfiore returned after his leave of absence. God help you.
garfieldnate 9y ago
Yes! I love my Windows 8 phone! I hated Windows 8 for desktops because it felt like they were trying to turn my PC into a cell phone. But the design is great for an actual phone! Unlike on iOS, the app icons can be dynamic and you can change their size and what's displayed. My Lumia 928 feels better in my hand than anything else I've ever handled, and the screen contrast and true black is great, even in direct sunlight. I love having a dedicated camera button, too. I actually don't personally care too much that there are so few apps.
Animats 9y ago
Do apps matter much, after the top ones? All the volume is in the top 10 apps now. After the top 100, does it matter at all?
- deafcalculus 9y ago
  That's what I thought too. But the top 100 might be different for different people.
yCloser 9y ago
man, the windows app store was a joke. a teenager could write something better in node/angular in a week
nathan_f77 9y ago
I couldn't find any incentives as a solo game developer earlier this year. I developed a game with React Native and thought it would be interesting to release a Windows Phone [1] version... but it was not. I think I only had one person install it, and that was a friend who I asked to try it out. Of course, the main reason is probably that my game is just not very compelling, or I failed with marketing. But I definitely won't be launching any more apps for Windows. I would have loved to get a free Windows phone so I could have tested the game on a real device, but it makes sense that they can't just give away phones to random indie developers. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sudoblock/9np72dfcvkbw https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sudoblock/9np72dfcvk...

cm2187 9y ago

I remember they started by introducing the same sort of toll than Apple. That was them shooting themselves in the foot.

dhimes 9y ago
This is what I thought too. If they're also going to charge in the ballpark of 30%, then they're not serious. They're not giving the proper incentive.

aloisdg 9y ago

I used to be a MSP from Mango to WP8.1. I will always be impress by everything MS did for devs and students. If you have the will to build an app, you could have, to help you, free licenses, free marketplace, free phone and tablet to test, free ms dev time to help you, free commercial time to help you share you app, free press coverage, free conferences, etc. They did so much, sometimes I felt impostor to don't do more. So much money was here to support.

nathantotten 9y ago

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement of that app and other flagship apps was not a core focus. Work was outsourced and not given enough resources. Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. From my prospective the focus was on filling the store with apps regardless of quality. This convinced the first generation of Microsoft loyalists to buy Windows Phones, but turned off many of those people. Most would not go on to buy a second WP or recommend them to friends and family. This includes many (dare I say most) Microsoft employees who where enthusiastic about the product at first, but when it came time to buy a second or third device moved on to Android or iPhone.

nova22033 9y ago
>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?
- EpicEng 9y ago
  On the other hand, if all WP has is half-baked clones of better apps on Android/iOS, there's even less incentive to switch over. If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)
- nathantotten 9y ago
  You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2]. To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people. If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow. Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dollars-windows-phone-7/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-200-million-for-windows-phone-marketing-push/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...

wslh 9y ago

If you really want to build a platform and developers didn't come you should build part of the software youself or pay third parties.

addicted 9y ago
That was Apple's strategy. They built some really great Mac OS X apps when they were the underdog, and offered them for free with the hardware. They also built (and bought) some great Pro apps which attracted a ton of customers. The iLife suite and even the iWork suite to some extent (I loved Keynote in college) were essential to me making the switch.

spoiledtechie 9y ago

Im still on the platform. I was holding out, hoping for something. But I guess my current phone will be my last windows phone. Sad.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
I'm still on the platform as well (typing this on a Lumia 635). To be honest I only bought it as I wanted a cheap smartphone but it's served me very well. I don't really use that many apps (Baconit and Metrotube are the two I use the most), but the WinPhone 8.1 UI is probably the best phone UI I've ever used (I prefer it over iOS and Android). Thankfully I've already got my next phone lined up (Librem 5).
mattnewport 9y ago
Me too, guess I'm going to have to make this phone last until another alternative to iOS and Android appears. I've preordered a Purism Librem 5 as part of their crowd funding campaign so hoping maybe that comes to something.
at-fates-hands 9y ago
The platform will still be supported, but new hardware or features won't be coming, which is fine with me. If anything, I'll stick with MS for now and then switch to IOS sometime in the next few years. You can still get the new HP Elite X3 and the Lumia 950 and 950XL on ebay for around $300.

MiddleEndian 9y ago

I loved the UI, design, consistency, etc. I liked it because it was straightforward and rarely notified me about anything. I left because of w10m specifically. They took away the consistency. It felt as janky as Android does. After I dropped and broke my last WP8 device, I had to decide whether I wanted to order another old WP8 phone online or just switch to Android. I switched to Android. It's not nearly as nice as WP8 was but what can you do?

shanev 9y ago

Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.

spoiledtechie 9y ago
10k seems reasonable enough to port it. Why didn't you?
- herbst 9y ago
  For everything else than a small local app that is not exactly a very eye opening offer IMO. Think about the learning time for the completely new eco system. The new hardware and software that is needed costs money as well.
- phkahler 9y ago
  How can you say that without knowing 1) what the app is and 2) what tools it was built with? There's also the problem of ongoing maintenance on multiple platforms. In the best case, it was written with a dual platform toolkit (iOS and Android) and MS adds a 3rd platform to that toolkit to make it easy to port and maintain all three. Even if that were all true, it's won't be for every developer and you'll still have problems bringing people to the platform.
  - shanev 9y ago
    1) http://www.drumkit.co http://www.drumkit.co 2) Built in Objective-C with a custom audio engine in C++. Audio latency on Android was horrible at that time, MS was probably worse. It would have been a terrible app on those platforms if I did port it. This was before cross-platform toolkits existed. It needed to be a native app with low level access audio to hardware. I wasn't going to make an app where you tap a drum and wait 100ms to hear a sound.
    - kpxxx 9y ago
      > MS was probably worse. Not that this counters anything you said nor that relevant to this topic, but as a nerd I am genuinely curious if this was true. I used to write lowlat audio stuff for iOS so I was well aware of the situation Android vs iOS (and because of my large interest in audio Android in general always makes me puke in my mouth a little -- like it is one of those neat little hidden indicators that while Apple is a hardware company, Google is fundamentally an ad company -- they really don't give a shit other than prioritizing ad delivery). Anyway, Windows itself obviously has solid low-lat audio services, was it really that bad in the mobile stuff?

jetti 9y ago

I had a Windows Phone 7 and loved it but ended up not being able to afford the monthly payments at the time that was required for having a smart phone. I didn't have much of an app issue but that was because I didn't have the phone long enough. I have a co-worker that also had a Windows phone as his previous phone and liked it. He wanted to get another when it was time to upgrade but he couldn't, there just wasn't any available.

ransom1538 9y ago

"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem" Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin. https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-apps-are-actually-used/ https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...

jk2323 9y ago
Whatsapp? WeChat? Ueber? Ofo? Tinder? I hardly use my phone for calls. In fact, I prefer Whatsapp or Wechat. And nope, I don't have netflix on my phone.
jsight 9y ago
Yeah, I think that the focus on apps might have actually been part of their problem. How many consumers really saw anything about the platform that made it more appealing than competing platforms? Without a solid killer feature as a differentiator, the apps wouldn't matter. I'm sure that it made a great measurable and a great excuse for failure, though. I don't doubt that the internal narrative would focus on that.
arkades 9y ago
Your post and his comment do not contradict one another. Or rather, your interpretation of the data in that post is shaky. Consistent with the data presented in that post: -I download lots of one-time-use apps. They're useful, and I won't use a phone without them, and then uninstall them in a week (eg, city specific apps when traveling) - I download lots of special use apps that contribute few app-hours most of the time, but are super critical when I need them (hiking apps when hiking, service-specific references when I'm working in the relevant department, etc) -I download games (lots of them), play with them for a while, and then uninstall for a new game. Yeah, most are gone in a week or a month, but the ongoing process is valuable to me. (Edit addendum: -I have apps I use quasi-frequently and that contribute very few app-hours of interaction, but are still valuable. Eg, the couple minutes a day I use a task list, the five minutes a week I use FreshDirect, etc.) And then, yes, there are a handful of core apps that get most of my usage (outlook, kindle, Netflix, messages, safari). This is entirely consistent with those stats, and still places enormous value on the app ecosystem.

rqs 9y ago

> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software) I don't love the design, but I like it. Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen. Yes, there are some bad designs in the Windows 10 Mobile, but all of them are fixable. And once those problems get fixed, it will be gorgeous. I feel very sad about their current failure, and I don't think simply give up is a good choose.

pm90 9y ago
Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be something that they just can't get right about mobile OS (or probably its simply the fact that the market doesn't have space enough for yet another proprietary OS). MS will do a lot better if it focuses on making android betters, supporting .NET apps in android (yay Mono!). Maybe in the future they could revisit the mobile OS thing and have better luck then but for the near future it looks very unlikely. The mark of a good company is adaptability. Intel went from RAM chip maker to creating microprocessors, MS itself went from creating BASIC compilers to making OS's. With Azure, .NET, Office, Windows etc. I think they have enough areas to make money off. Its just their strategy of adapting windows to mobile devices didn't work.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I only see a value on .NET apps on Android for those companies planning to do both iOS and Android, or re-using existing .NET code. For those just targeting Android, specially given the global market share, they are better off with plain Java/Kotlin + NDK, than adding yet another layer to debug and extra APK size.
  - izacus 9y ago
    ".NET apps on Android/iOS" are actually a very popular thing - the framework is just named Xamarin instead of .NET.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

They even held a funeral for their competitors devices: https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-windows-phone-7-rtm-with-funeral-parade-for/ https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-win... This didn't age well.

golfer 9y ago
Microsoft has been tone deaf about a lot of things... This is a prime example. Not a lot of self awareness on their part. This was cringe worthy.
cubano 9y ago
Without a doubt this stunt marked the absolute death knell for WP...my God the arrogance of those people.
cjsuk 9y ago
That is sickeningly hilarious.
elsurudo 9y ago
Heh. I was an intern there when this happened. In fact I think I was in the float in front of this one. To be honest this was blown out of proportion a bit. It was an internal celebration of release, and each team picked a theme. Most in good fun. In retrospect the funeral themed-one... yeah... didn't age well, and was perhaps in bad taste (I can't recall which team this was). It was just a bunch of overworked PMs, devs, and testers having some fun and blowing off steam.
Rjevski 9y ago
The walk of shame.
Dragonai 9y ago
Goodness gracious.
pweissbrod 9y ago
I'll file that next to the windows 7 release party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

jk2323 9y ago

It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.

brohee 9y ago
That doesn't make much sense, apps made for mouse and keyboard on a large screen won't magically become usable on a small touchscreen...
- macintux 9y ago
  That's always been a weakness with Microsoft's strategy. First with a stylus for Windows Mobile, later with the ribbon in Office.
charlesdm 9y ago
That UX will just be amazing
criddell 9y ago
> Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything? I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don't think they can compete.
- Const-me 9y ago
  > Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view Windows is way ahead in both security and power efficiency. About security, here’s an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410833 In Windows, clipboard access was restricted to foreground app since WP7. About power efficiency, WP is very restrictive on what apps can do in background. See this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh202942(v=vs.105).aspx#BKMK_ConstraintsforallScheduledTaskTypes https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh2029...

mgkimsal 9y ago

> For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc I remember some of this vaguely. A friend of mine deep in the MS world was showing me some of what was going on, but this "ran promotions" - I dunno. I don't think I'm way out in "non-MS" land - I keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of tech communities. I didn't hear much about this except from a few friends deeply entrenched in MS. Perhaps there wasn't enough of an outreach program? > Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. Given that I've registered multiple times with them to download various SDKs in the past, perhaps... emailing me about what they were doing, because I might have had an interest in being part of that app development push? Maybe some actual ads on non-MS tech-related websites, or outreach to local non-MS user groups might have helped? As someone who's run multiple local tech groups, and frequented many for years, this "big focus of microsoft" was never a blip on anyone's radar (AFAICR). > giving away free phones That's sort of the bare minimum you'd need to do. I'm reminded a bit about the HP tablets with webOS. They charged $499 (because, IIRC, "that's the price for tablets" - because of iPads), sold for a few weeks, then discontinued. Loads of people picked them up at $150-$200, even with no apps. "Well, we can't win, let's close it all down", after spending $1B+ on acquiring the stuff they're giving up on in the first place.

mobilio 9y ago
I remember that story for tablets. Same was with Amazon Fire Phone. But i don't know how you can write off $1B... because honestly even iPod or iPhone wasn't successfully from the beginning. So they invest years for that status. Competitors make clones, release them and after two months declaring abandoning market. Totally non-sence for me!
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  What's so weird about... well. not weird - just stupid(?). The HP thing - the guy in charge who made those decisions left soon after, IIRC (maybe was forced out, but didn't sound like it). You spend $1B acquiring palm for webOS, but don't want to invest any more in actually trying to market or develop developers? They flew off the shelves at $150/bucks, even with knowing there's no support, etc. Hobbyists wanted them. Some of my friends and family wanted one. I couldn't justify $500, but could $200 (but couldn't get any at that price). Let's say they'd sold them at a loss - let's say $149, and they were losing $50 on each one. Getting 2 million of those in people's hands in a year would have 'cost' $100m, but ... the ecosystem would have had a reason to grow, because there would have been a market to serve. Had discussions with folks who claimed "you can't do that" (for some reason, bringing "dumping" and "illegality" in to the argument). So... selling them at $150 while "going out of business" is AOK, but selling that at $150, taking a loss while trying to grow a market (and creating more long term value for the people buying them) "makes no sense" (that was one of the arguments I got from folks). Of course, it's all academic, and I'm just armchair quarterbacking the whole thing, but few companies even have the option of strategic long term losses to seed/grow a market. I'd think the rewards would be substantial if you can pull it off, but we don't seem to have many who want to try anymore, and that lack of trying really cements the two-party system we have in mobile.

marindez 9y ago

>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text. That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your numbers.

distances 9y ago
Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve. And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  I remember a co-worker who would scan the latest IOS apps and then install them and demonstrate them at lunch for us. One day he was really happy with his latest download: A "softserve poop" app. The other one was a "virtual bong hit" app. But yeah, lots of bloatware and apps that were worthless, but could hold your attention for a few minutes until you uninstalled it.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

I really would love to see a Microsoft mobile device. My issue was lack of available devices on my carrier, and when I did find them they hardly were competitive with the available Android alternatives. I hope Microsoft does return to the Mobile OS market, but I hope they pull all the right moves off to get real traction going. I still remember having a code to be a Windows developer for free as a student but never had the time to build any apps so I never took advantage of my developer code. I do hope Microsoft returns back at it someday. I hope they bring out "Super Phones" on every major carrier that truly compete. Also hope they don't bring some of the pain points of Windows 10 (forced updates, forced telemetry and what not). Google and Apple need a serious competitor. Ubuntu bailed and I wish they had not. It seems like a very specialized OS needs to be built and it needs to hit market on all major carriers with new things to offer that are worthwhile. Privacy would be a strong selling point if anyone else attempts it. I want a privacy focused and open source mobile alternative, feels like I'll wait a long time for it though. Microsoft has the resources to provide such an alternative though... Would be definitely different if they went that route.

ygra 9y ago
Being able to compete is mostly having an app platform on par with iOS or Android. Precisely the point where Windows Phone is lacking. This is a situation I don't see changing, especially not without hardware. Furthermore, releasing a phone with good hardware at a competitive price point means either losing money to push into the market (which I think MS has done the past few years with their mobile offerings), or having a supply chain to have good hardware at a low-enough price (something which Apple and Samsung already have). I kinda doubt there will be a good third mobile option again. The choices currently are to target iOS to make money, or Android to reach more users and for most apps there's isn't much point in supporting anything else. Plus, there aren't that many apps built upon frameworks that would allow easy addition of a third build target. There also doesn't seem to be much point in offering an open-source mobile platform. The partners you need to convince to offer phones with your platform don't care (much) whether it's open-source or proprietary. In Android's case the open-source-ness pretty much only matters for Amazon and a tiny fraction of users that install custom builds. Google has certainly tried to wrestle as much control of the platform back, both for control reasons, and to be able to provide a better user and update experience (Things a hardware vendor won't care much about. They make money when you buy the phone, not when you use it.).

mjw1007 9y ago

A couple of years ago we sent two people to a meeting at Microsoft to talk about a port of an existing Android/iOS app. The work was already funded so we were really just hoping for a free phone or two. The report I heard back was that they treated it as an opportunity to try to sell us Office 365. (The port never happened because the client's plans to roll out Windows phone to their staff fell through some time later.)

philliphaydon 9y ago

The problem with windows phone / mobile is not the apps. It was Microsoft. When Apple launches an Phone, it’s avaliable world wide. When Microsoft launches a phone, it’s avaliable in America. My last windows phone was a Lumia 925, the last Lumia announced I waited 7 months for it to reach singapore before throwing in the towel and going android. There were no phones avaliable outside America, uk, Australia. Now I use iPhone. I have no sympathy for Microsoft in regards to it’s phone biz because it didn’t try to break the market.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This. I knew everyone from seniors, the a police chief, to tech folks carrying Windows phones. The apps we needed were there. But Microsoft had a nearly-useless approach to hardware releases, they constantly missed the boat. I currently carry the last Windows Mobile phone on Verizon (the US' largest carrier). It is from 2014. (Actually, a new Elite x3 is coming out next week, three years later.) This is ridiculous. When the Elite x3 originally came out, we wondered what insanity was someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users. We didn't need apps, we needed phones.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users Whose fault is this though? Was it missing a particular radio band, or was it anti-competitive behaviour by Verizon? I'm used to just buying phones and slipping in the SIM.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Verizon has a certification process, but they are effectively required by law to accept all compatible phones. Microsoft didn't even submit any of their recent phones for Verizon certification, even if they had chips which supported Verizon bands. Actually, HP is just now (like, this month) releasing a version of the Elite x3 that is Verizon-certified. https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/get-certified https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/get-certified https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase/device/4916 https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase/...

jbigelow76 9y ago

>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. The one thing MS didn't try to incentivize independent app developers was to eliminate the 30% revenue cut MS would take on the sale of paid apps. I always thought it would have been a good differentiation as there were always complaints that it was getting too hard to for indies to make it in the iOS app store. Even if MS would have said they were waiving the commission during an introductory period of a few years it might have helped. It seemed penny wise, pound foolish to think they could charge the same skim that Apple does.

WorldMaker 9y ago
I recall they announced promotions like that as well. At one point I recall they would auto-cut at least in half for some amount of time if your app was chosen for the front page of the Store. Since the Anniversary Update last year, sideloading has been enabled by default, too, if you wanted to sell apps outside the store, and that didn't magically attract indies either.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Sideloading is a thing on Android too, but it really doesn't attract a lot of devs or users. Most users stick to the stores, cause they don't want to go chase down and give their payment info to infinity different sites.
tomaskafka 9y ago
Not sure it would have helped. Any rational high-profile dev will compute that 70 % * 100 000 downloads is better that 100 % of 1000 downloads.
- rodorgas 9y ago
  Sure, but it's not like they have to choose one or another. And 100% of 1000 downloads is better than 70% of 1000 downloads.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shubhamjain 9y ago

> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem. From my experience, that wasn't the case. I didn't own a Windows Phone but one of my friends did. According to him, what forced him to move was an overload of animations which became very irritating. I can recall a comment that suggested how Windows phone exploited animations to cover the fact that it was too slow.

usaphp 9y ago
Yep, that’s exactly the reason why I hated it. Those animations looked nice at first but after a while they get so annoying and even launching a dialer took much longer than needed because of those flight animations. Also I did not like the flat look and flat colors. All the apps looked the same, so did the icons. The best thing about App Store on iOS was the colorful variety of apps where each of them had a unique distinct look and it was a joy to expolore new wild apps on the marketplace.
throwaway7645 9y ago
Several of my friends and I loved Windows phone and I hate Windows (prefer Linux). Sounds weird, but I've always thought Windows Phone to be more elegant than Android.
throwaway613834 9y ago
That's very true for Windows Phone. The animations definitely got irritating.
nathanasmith 9y ago
Back in 2011, I bought an HTC HD7 from a friend who switched back to Android. I was very impressed by how fast Windows Phone 7 was especially the ultra-smooth scrolling. But, like you said, the animations were enough to drive you nuts. Way too much, I don't know what to call it, "swoopy" maybe. It was enough to make you dizzy. I ended up trading the phone for a Galaxy S and that was the end of Windows Phone for me.

winphoneappdev 9y ago

Having done my fair share of windows phone app development (8.0, 8.1, 10) I can confirm. Microsoft incentivized app development, and paid top game development companies millions and gave them featured placements for their half-assed windows phone ports. And then as a regular joe you would actually put in the effort* to get things working well. Then you would watch these bug-plagued big name 3-star ports appear out of nowhere and usurp you on the top free lists and search results due to their favorable placements. And then you would move on to a fairer market, and when microsoft stopped paying them, the big app developers did too (not that they ever updated or fixed the bugs on windows phone releases.) * Difficult as windows phone was the only mobile platform not supporting openGL in hardware and the top sold windows phones were incredibly low spec.

pjmlp 9y ago
Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.
- dc443 9y ago
  Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that... They could do it, though. They could.
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    They might not remove it any time soon, but they could easily never update it.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    They already re-wrote most all relevant graphics APIs including the macOS compositor to use Metal as backend. All major middleware engines already support Metal as well, and relevant companies like Adobe are using it as well. Even if they don't officially drop GL, they could just leave it on life support, similarly to Carbon APIs.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    They are definitely not helping. They promote SceneKit and Metal over all else. Granted Metal is WAY better than OpenGL

sametmax 9y ago

They tried everything, except for open standards, foss, focus on user privacy or anything that would have have made them different.

jimmies 9y ago
That is pretty much the reason I didn't have a Windows phone. I would have considered it if it actually did promise privacy. Free phone sounds nice, but tinkerers like me don't want to apply and get the approval lottery for shit. We wanted cheap phones. The Android ecosystem at that time was already matured to the point that you can get cheap no frills, no worries if you break it secondhands. It was an obvious choice when I could get a secondhand Android phone with all the stuff I could tinker with for $100, and that also gave me the unexplored freedom to get any ROM I want. I remember porting Cyanogenmod 9 on my shitty 2 year old OG Motorola Droid, and control every aspect of it.

JamesBarney 9y ago

I stopped using the windows for the same reason. I loved that I could buy a performant phone for $50 when my $200 Android feels sluggish. But I hated not having any apps. Specifically I hated all the shitty apps that had flooded the app store because of their half baked promotions. All of their promotions incentivized churning out a bunch of shitty apps. Like paying people $100 per app, this created a lot of crap in the app store to wade through to find quality apps. Instead they should have matched revenue or paid an extra 5 cents per download. Something to incentivize a dev to write one good app instead of 5 throw away apps.

Spooky23 9y ago

They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones. The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms. O365 is a great example... the office platform should be an amazing mobile platform that drives all sorts of interesting things. But as an O365 customer, Microsoft just uses it as a lever to push their MDM product (you cannot configure Office apps without Microsoft stuff). MDM is a pure commodity play. Microsoft would rather made $4.99 month on Intune than capture business process on their platform, which is worth 10x more. Meanwhile Apple treats everyone pretty equally, and you can actually get stuff done. I said this 20 years ago and it is still true today... Microsoft should spin off Office, server and client into different companies. Office could be an exponentially more valuable cash cow without being dragged down by the shitshow of Windows. Windows on client is a legacy product providing solutions to problems that people don’t have. Office is fundamentaly a more valuable platform. Where I work, PC users spend more time in Outlook any other application. Browser and Word account for about 50% and 25% less time on average. So why are we presenting this UI optimized for computing circa 1997 where people run lots of little apps? Apple got this right by making iOS very low touch.

pjc50 9y ago
Outlook+Exchange is really the thing keeping Microsoft alive.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  For now. Some of the younger people aren't having any of that shit these days.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    If they work at any big enterprise it is either Outlook or Lotus Notes. The latter will make them love Outlook.

arenaninja 9y ago

I bought someone a Windows phone and they had the same feedback - big name apps not available (whatsapp, instagram, etc.) I wanted to buy a Windows phone since I use none of these apps, but there was no hardware refresh or major announcements around Windows phones and that deterred me. I don't understand how MS went on to a successful Surface and failed phones, I would think they're similar markets - hype-driven, takes a few iterations to get right, etc. I bought the Google G2 and it was far from what an Android phone is today, but Windows phones seem to run on a no-upgrade strategy which is strange

cjsuk 9y ago
I think that's close to the truth but really there has never been any product direction or commitment from MSFT. why would you build a product on that? Surface isn't successful. It's a disaster. Just a well covered up one so far. Give it a couple of years and it'll be down the toilet as well. Consumer Reports dumped on them last year with a 25% failure rate within 2 years. Rather than deal with this, they go into denial and market market market mode. The problem is that they're building products they want, not what the user wants. And when the user asks for something, they just say NOTHING and drown out all the negativity with blogs and hype and pointless communication paths to pacify the users who are pissed off. On top of all that there is this personality cult around Satya where everyone is saying he's the second coming, the saviour and all that junk. Turns out that it's blinded marketing, the enterprise customers are getting shafted (me) and footing the bill for cock up after cock up after cock up. Quality is gone. Privacy is gone. No one says anything. Everyone is voting with their feet. Same turd of a company as ever.
mattnewport 9y ago
There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.
- arenaninja 9y ago
  Yes I imagine some of these exist now, I purchased that device some years ago now

teekert 9y ago

I loved it too, but my Nokia Lumia 800 never got updated. Loved the flow of things, it was fast, Whatsapp worked basically all I needed. But I did feel screwed as an early adopter. Why was I never able to run APKs? That would have helped so much...

pwdisswordfish 9y ago

I loved my Lumia 920, and if only there were apps, I would not be using iPhone right now. Major things I've missed that were available on android/iOS: banking app - some other banks had an app for WP, but I didn't want to switch banks public transit route planner - there were some, iOS and android had THE app for my city with really good bus arrival estimates official public transit app - I couldn't buy tickets from my phone official city parking app - had to go to parking teller and pay there in friggin cash, now I just set the zone and am done with it even the most popular taxi app was not available Hearthstone - I like this rng card game

zyme 9y ago
I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast. My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same. A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost. Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win. Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...

dtx1 9y ago

I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it. Then windows 10 came and it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. The Live-Tiles got even worse since you couldn't programm them like the windows 8 ones. Just a whole mess. Couple that with the hillariously bad store interface (backend aswell as frontend) and 0 User engagement and it was bound to fail (as will all UWP apps) You guys build a, I'm sorry to say but after 3 years of frustration it's fair to say, half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android, restricted the developers unecessarily, broke compatibility once a year requiring a complete rewrite and frankly build a product that only microsoft liked but was universally hated by their users. It's a story of too little too late and a whole lot of arrogance on microsofts side. Oh and don't even get me started on microsoft completely ignoring the european market where they actually got up to 15% marketshare of new devices sold for a while.

narrator 9y ago
The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  Yes. They also rewrite stuff half way through and tell you it's the same project just to piss you off. Windows Workflow and Windows Communication Foundation for example. I'm really disinclined to invest in any of their technology because my headspace is finite and I want to deliver business value, not change the unworn carpets once a year.

toast0 9y ago

The lack of apps was annoying at time, but what made me leave was probably Microsoft Edge. The rendering was clearly better than IE, but Edge would crash my phone, or become non responsive, or both so often (creators update on Lumia 640 LTE). If the browser doesn't work, and there are no apps, it doesn't make sense to have the phone.

JamesUtah07 9y ago
I don't understand why Microsoft has keep IE/Edge around. It's just embarrassing. Event my technology illiterate friends and family rag on IE and everyone installs chrome these days. If they spend less time building IE and focused on other platforms they'd waste a lot less time for everyone including themselves.
- toast0 9y ago
  Well, when Mozilla wanted to build Firefox for Windows Mobile, Microsoft told them no. If they removed IE/Edge, they would have no browser for the deployed windows mobile devices. :P
- jhbadger 9y ago
  They need it for the same reason Apple needs Safari. And why the European Union needs their GPS competitor Galileo. It's dangerous to put all your trust into a tool controlled by a competitor, even if they are playing nice with you at the moment.
- zyme 9y ago
  They need something built into the OS that supports HTML/HTML5, its what a lot of system interfaces and apps especially internet based ones like to be build from. Plus how would you download another windows browser - it would have to be in the app store first lol.

jhasse 9y ago

You know what would have been an incentive for me (and I guess thousand of other game devs) to support windows phone? Support for OpenGL ES.

pjmlp 9y ago
So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS? Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP.
- jhasse 9y ago
  > So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS? No, I will continue using OpenGL ES. Anyway: Apple can afford pushing it's own API due to market share, Microsoft could not. > Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP. I know, but it didn't support a feature I needed at the time and also it was quite a hassle. Together with the non-GCC/Clang compiler it was just too much.

flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago

>they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. Is anyone else surprised that "giving away free windows phones" was not a recipe for success in terms of incentivising capable app developers? Most every app developer already owns their favorite phone because they can afford it.

emodendroket 9y ago
Most apps make a pittance.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
  What does that have to do with anything?
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I think the idea that app developers are all loaded is highly suspect.
    - flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
      Sure, but Microsoft doesn't want to incentivize people who write mediocre apps that make no money to write apps for their app store. They want to incentivize people to write apps that bring in the big bucks. So they can get a cut.
nashashmi 9y ago
They should have also given away free phones to end users. And for the other users who bought stuff, they should have given them 100$ of credit to buy apps. And then periodically rewarded great users with 100$. it would have been like a tax break for the users to spur the app economy.

guftagu 9y ago

Yeah, I won a WOWZAPP competition by making an HTML5 game in 2 days, wrapping it up in a Windows 8 app and publishing it to store. I got a Lumia 800 for it which ran Windows phone 7. When they already had Windows 8 devices out and the competition was to make Windows 8 apps. I still don't know what they expected me to do with this obsolete phone. That phone was useless to me because there were literally no apps on the Windows 7 store. When I tried to sell it few days later, no one was even willing to consider it and I had to sell it for peanuts.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

My wife complains bitterly that she is unable to keep her Windows phone. I wonder sometimes if this ecosystem was killed by "expectation disease" where success was defined as '1/3 the market or better'. It is a common problem of insecure BigCorp type thinking when trying to break into a market, it has killed Google in the social space. This is the kind of issue that really needs a 'peanut butter factory'[1] approach. [1] The 'peanut butter factory' has been a silicon valley euphemism for a small team of engineers from a "big" company that have gone off to build a new project without having the big company drag them down.

r00fus 9y ago

Did they do what Apple did and setup a seed fund to get startups ready to compete with the big platforms? See iFund (2008): https://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/06/ifund-to-offer-100-million-in-seed-money-to-iphone-developers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/06/ifund-to-offer-100-mill... The fact is, you should incentivize funders/investors, not developers. The developers will follow if they have a hot new startup where they can (potentially) mint money using your seed capital. However, I agree this only works if you aren't seriously late to the party.

fpig 9y ago

Windows phones themselves are fine. But two things were massive failures: 1. Microsoft created development tools that are not appropriate for real-world use cases and tried to push that on devs and companies, which failed spectacularly. The demand for apps which work on Windows desktop and Windows phone literally doesn't exist. It doesn't matter that Microsoft would have loved it if people built apps like that. If there is no demand for such apps they don't get built (and they didn't). You get garbage (compared to WPF or even WinForms) "metro" or whatever you call them now desktop apps that are intensely hated by Windows users and you get a WP app that you can't reuse to build an iOS or Android app... The UI was also completely different so you couldn't even really reuse much of the design. So no code sharing, no design sharing. What .NET devs wanted was a way to build apps using C# that work on all mobile platforms (we never cared about a mobile app working on desktop). If you had given us that you would have had your apps purely by virtue of piggybacking on iOS, Android and .NET popularity. We complained about the retarded "multiplatform within the Windows ecosystem" approach from day 1 yet Microsoft released several iterations (not backwards-compatible, of course, so they were losing some devs each time) of this garbage before finally listening to the market and embracing Xamarin at which point it no longer mattered as WP was a joke. A LOT of people love C# and are willing to jump through hoops to develop multiplatform apps with it. XAML is also very cool. Microsoft had that part in the bag, yet completely failed to use this to their advantage. Imagine if when WP7 (or even WP8) was released Microsoft was able to say "here, you can now develop mobile apps in C# and they will also build for iOS and Android!" .NET devs would have jizzed in their pants. 2. Microsoft threw the existing WP users in the trash with WP7 -> WP8. My iPhone updated for like 7 years through god knows how many iOS versions. When I bought a new one, it felt almost exactly the same except faster due to better hardware. People were wary of buying a WP because they got burned once.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Wrong. Take a look at another platform that Microsoft pushed into: game consoles. How did they break into game consoles? They bought an entire game studio, Bungie, and produced one of the most best selling games of all time (Halo) as an exclusive title. Nothing Microsoft did with Windows phone was on remotely the same scale. The fact that a movie of that scale would have been vastly more costly than the acquisition of Bungie and development of Halo is merely an indication of the fact that MS waited too long, not that nothing could be done.

Sephr 9y ago

There's an obvious incentive they haven't tried: guaranteeing a lower app store margin like 1-2% instead of the 30% cut that Microsoft currently takes. Google and Apple have already convinced a sufficient number of users users that their app stores are essential, so they can continue to charge whatever they like. Microsoft didn't have the same luxury, so they needed to change this. They never made the change and it's too late now, but I think if they did this a few years ago they would be in a better position.

s73ver_ 9y ago
A good amount of the "key apps" are free anyway, so a lower margin wouldn't have helped there.

ghthor 9y ago

The best thing a new phone platform could do is essentially create an App building framework like React Native that allows developers to build apps targeting the new platform and the existing platforms at the same time(maybe not as a first class citizen initially, but those platform devs and fill in the blanks). That's about the only way that, as an engineer, I"m going to give a shit about developing for your app platform. If I care, and I make cool apps, then the user base size doesn't matter, I'll still target it because it makes my life better as a developer.

Buttes 9y ago

It's almost like if you shit on developers for a decade people don't wanna bother with your new platform.

nunez 9y ago

Which is a real damn shame because WP was such a fine OS and was the REAL competitor to the iPhone in terms of UX and hardware design (Lumia line).

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

Microsoft decided that a great way to get apps for their phone would be to make a UI for both desktop and phone and force developers to use it. In a single stroke they alienated all their existing desktop developers while forcing potential phone app developers to have to think about far more complex problems. Their message to developers was that they must learn something new. And so they did. XCode.

pbarnes_1 9y ago

Nope. We're a mid-size SaaS app and not a single person from MS made any sort of overture to us apart from "you should develop for Windows Phone!". It would have cost us like 100-200k and 9-12 months of developer time to do this. And then again for 10. And provide support for the rest of time. Nope! We laughed at them in the background and awaited its eventual death. That we didn't put a single second of effort into developing for this platform has finally been vindicated! :) Forcing devs to rewrite stuff every major release made it pretty clear no one there cared about developers.

IgorPartola 9y ago

I wonder what would have happened if they competed on pure price. Like if they basically gave away 10m devices. That’s a small amount but it could have kickstarted something. App developers have to choose which platforms to support. The cost is nearly doubled if you go from just one to both dominant platforms. Adding a third would nearly triple it. It is not worth it if suddenly you can reach a whole lot of people. Going after developers is good if there isn’t a market already. Going after consumers might have created a critical mass where developers would have just showed up on their own. Maybe a campaign to hand a new Windows phone to every college kid on campus would have worked. College kids aren’t flush with spending money, so a free phone would be a boon. But college kids also graduate and get jobs, making future phone purchases a possibility. Plus college kids tend to be trend setters for technology in situations like this. Eh, I am rambling. People much smarter than me have probably already thought of this.

pxeboot 9y ago
They practically did. I bought a Windows phone for $30 a couple years ago.
- zyme 9y ago
  That's how much my mom's Lumia 640-LTE cost a few years ago - I think right after it was first released. Such a good price for the hardware if only it could run something useful, the latest 10 Mobile build does count...

pilsetnieks 9y ago

I got a Lumia 820 that way. I loved that OS and I'm sad it never got the recognition it deserved. If nothing else, a serious competitor to the other two major OSs with such radically different design might inspire Apple and Google to something beyond the tired old icons on a grid.

rodorgas 9y ago

I think Microsoft could greatly improve developer support. I've sent my Edge extension in April and still have no response.

dethswatch 9y ago

It was the first phone I'd bought in 7 years that didn't let you add your own ringtones. That's how far behind it was. I didn't get copy/paste for about a year. It's like you guys were -trying- to cargo-cult the iphone. Unfortunately, Belfiore returned after his leave of absence. God help you.

garfieldnate 9y ago

Yes! I love my Windows 8 phone! I hated Windows 8 for desktops because it felt like they were trying to turn my PC into a cell phone. But the design is great for an actual phone! Unlike on iOS, the app icons can be dynamic and you can change their size and what's displayed. My Lumia 928 feels better in my hand than anything else I've ever handled, and the screen contrast and true black is great, even in direct sunlight. I love having a dedicated camera button, too. I actually don't personally care too much that there are so few apps.

Animats 9y ago

Do apps matter much, after the top ones? All the volume is in the top 10 apps now. After the top 100, does it matter at all?

deafcalculus 9y ago
That's what I thought too. But the top 100 might be different for different people.

yCloser 9y ago

man, the windows app store was a joke. a teenager could write something better in node/angular in a week

nathan_f77 9y ago

I couldn't find any incentives as a solo game developer earlier this year. I developed a game with React Native and thought it would be interesting to release a Windows Phone [1] version... but it was not. I think I only had one person install it, and that was a friend who I asked to try it out. Of course, the main reason is probably that my game is just not very compelling, or I failed with marketing. But I definitely won't be launching any more apps for Windows. I would have loved to get a free Windows phone so I could have tested the game on a real device, but it makes sense that they can't just give away phones to random indie developers. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sudoblock/9np72dfcvkbw https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sudoblock/9np72dfcvk...