Comment by itsmenotyou
8 years ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Basically "Fire and Motion" in a situation where that strategy is NOT to their advantage.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
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I do get where you're coming from but I have a more moderate perspective.
I mean we can certainly point to examples where that's the case: Silverlight's a classic here, if that term's even appropriate, and then of course there's WP7, 8, and 10, as mentioned by the grandparent. And these are clearly not trivial examples.
Nevertheless, I must point out that large bodies of code I wrote in the mid-noughties are still running substantially unmodified today. What's perhaps interesting is that these codebases are desktop tools, where it can be argued that Microsoft have achieved true mastery (after WPF came out everything notably settled down, and unlike MFC and WinForms it really hasn't been replaced).
It tends to be other areas where the worst of the churn has occurred: web, mobile, database access (how many versions of EF to get it right?). Of course, these are areas that have seen significant growth over the past few years.
Still, even in their worst period Microsoft did not begin to approach the lunacy of framework churn in the JavaScript world.
My pet theory is that this is because the dev tools department at Microsoft is not a pure cost centre with the sole task of improving the platform, they have Visual Studio licenses to sell. If there is any truth in that, we should see a slow decline in "API of the year" as non-subscription licenses (where customers are prone to skip an update when it does not have enough "revolutionary must-haves") are slowly phased out.
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> The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time.
There was a time when MS would detecting the binary name, and change core kernel functionality just to provide bug-compatibility to older versions of Windows. By that time they got an unbeatable market dominance...
That’s because you don’t get promoted there unless you do something new and super complicated. That’s also part of the reason why Android SDK is such a pile of garbage, the other part being they rush half baked shit to market all the time.
In Microsoft's defense, they also tend to support their stuff for a long time. I work with MFC every day. It's 20+ years old and still being developed.
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I'm not sure it requires a rewrite, the old stuff still works. The trouble is the constant churn is draining, I've pretty much abandoned the platform because of it. We keep hearing about new JavaScript frameworks but we had exactly the same from MS: win32 => MFC => WTL => VB => WFC => Winforms => WPF => Metro => UWP, no doubt there is something else just around the corner.
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Microsoft used to only make money selling software licenses. This has changed with Azure cloud stuff, but the majority of their incentives still don't align with their developer/customers.
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Picking Apple as an example, other are possible.
Object Pascal, Powerplant, Quickdraw, Java Bridge, Quicktime, QuicktimeVR, Carbon, OpenGL, ...
Apparently only Microsoft does it.
This is exactly what made me quit desktop development on Windows. MFC, ATL, COM+ learning going to waste was a bridge too far.
There's a semi-contradiction in your post that I think speaks to some of the issues MS had:
"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 "
"half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android"
As someone who played around with WP7 when it first came out, I'd argue that the Metro UI was the best one available at the time. But the side effect of that is that it was different, and difficult to adapt an existing app to.
Essentially, MS needed to make a bold new platform with inventive new features, but also make the platform very compatible with the other major mobile platforms. You can't easily square that circle. Now, MS also messed up in a million and one ways (like my phone never getting a WP8 upgrade...) but I think their fundamental challenge was very, very difficult.
My wife had several Windows Phones in succession.
Her use of a phone is very practical: contacts, texting, weather information. All of this was available at a glance in a much much better way than either Android or the iPhone have. It was a better business UI.
It was harder to use if you had many apps. But seriously, having a phone open to the equivalent of Windows 3.1's Program Manager (which is what Android and iPhone deliver) is not great!
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Thats imo no contradictions. Metro did things different but in no way better and felt severly restricted compared to android/ios ui design at the time. They banked on having everything look the same in the whole OS but never considered that certain apps just straight up wouldn't work with the metro UI concept.
> that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android
According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/better in many ways although that is more recent. It has been a while since I have used a Windows Phone.
[0] Windows 8.1 definitely had it in 2014 according to this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10652/windows-phone... I'm pretty sure Windows Phones predating this also had it although documentation seems lacking.
[1] Wi-fi assist was introduced in iOS 9(2015). https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296
[2] There are apps for Android that do this but at least this one is 3rd party. No sources says it predates 2015. I have not experimented with this on Android. https://www.guidingtech.com/54831/get-ios-like-wi-fi-assist-...
> first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work.
Huh? Maybe my memory if failing me, but that's how networking on iOS always worked.
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> According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work.
This is the most infuriating feature ever. Google implemented it in 2014 in Android, and you couldn't properly disable it. Not even today.
I frequently need to connect to intranets where Google services are blocked for security reasons, and it's infuriating to fight hundreds of times with the settings so you can get the WiFi to work.
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> If I recall correctly Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones and Android didn't have at least at the time.
I remember having an app on android that did that long before windows phone had it. It was able to turn on/off your wifi based on your location. Great battery saver.
> In addition continuum is unique/better in many ways although that is more recent. It has been a while since I have used a Windows Phone.
Samsung cloned it for their S8 Series and it seems to be actually usable from the start compared to windows continuum. Though by the time continuum was available, wp was dead.
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> I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work.
If the wifi doesn't work, no phone will use it. If the wifi is BAD, that is completely different.
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I had the same experience while working on WP in 2012-13.
In early 2013, I reported a bug when some of the elements inside LongListSelector would disappear randomly on scrolling. LongListSelector is WP’s counterpart for iOS’s tableView.
So I started a discussion on Microsoft forums on this bug. Someone from Microsoft confirmed this bug.
I tracked this bug for 9 months. And guess what they never fixed it. They never fixed a critical bug in the most used UI component of mobile apps.
> 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.
A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare, but these apps keep getting cranked out. The Android / iOS language and platform api's are SNAFU, but people get still get into the IDE and start making, without any promise for a set of conversion-frameworks + XML files that will make the app for All The Things. At the rate an app builder is adding features, the universal-platform paradigm is cognitive overload.
I think a No-XML based approach to app development, similiar to VB6 / VBA, would have been greatly appreciated. If MS gives me a stable API to an email client, a calendar, a shared drive, and a messaging or video chat service, I'd spend the 5 hours to automate a 5 minute inconveneince. A windows phone with a bunch of "lifehacks" apps would tremendously useful to much of the smartphone market, as long as they had the cant-live-without-apps too.
> A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare
Xcode is absolutely sits at the bottom of the IDE rankings, but Eclipse shouldn't even be a concern for Android devs.
Android Studio is a very nice IDE and no Android dev should touch Eclipse ever again. It's a shame it's tied to the Android platform, honestly.
I'd kill to have Android Studio's functionality when developing for iOS. (And no, AppCode doesn't make the cut)
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> 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.
What was so horrible about it? I almost invested in a surface just off the strength of the UI; I rather liked that they were trying to merge desktop and tablet. Why was the experience so bad?
Windows 8 "metro" UI caused an uproar for many reasons, some of the biggest ones being:
- the start menu covered the whole screen
- applications could only run full screen, even the simplest ones. You literally couldn't have 2 applications on the screen at the same time.
- it was hard to close applications
- it was very difficult to find the shutdown/reset/etc options
- the metro versions of "default" apps looked bad and were vastly inferior to the "old" versions. A lot of system settings ones had this problem, too (not relevant to the average user, but I use a VPN that is impossible to set up to work in the simple "metro" VPN app, but if you find and start the old win7 app which still exists, you can set it up correctly and you can even connect to it from the "metro" VPN app after that)
- a lot of computer games that worked on 7 didn't work on 8 (likely unrelated to metro UI but still a reason for many people not to update)
Some problems were fixed in Windows 8.1. In Windows 10, most of these things are fine (although Win10 gets hate because of its update system and because it installs unwanted apps, but it seems to have much more acceptance overall).
Windows 8 basically offered nothing to the average user except annoyance so people didn't want to update. It had a very nice improvement for developers in the form of Hyper-V, which is the only reason I upgraded, and only after 8.1 was released.
The root problem with Windows 8 UI was that it was clearly not designed with the intention of being a better desktop UI. It was designed with the intention of forcing users to get used to the Windows Phone-style UI on their desktop computer, in hopes that they will then buy Windows Phones out of familiarity. Basically desktop Windows had to "take one for the team". We can see here how much that helped WP.
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The biggest frustration, to me, is that WPF was basically left on the vine while they pursued this WinRT stuff.
I think the evolutionary path connecting WPF and "this WinRT stuff" is extremely clear and if you've built WPF you can build UWP. UWP .NET/XAML is great to work with if you know WPF, it's truly a successor to WPF in every way. (It'll be even better soon [as in next month] thanks to .NET Standard 2.0.)
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Yeah, and what enterprise have done? It had to switch to legacy crap of JS and HTML(5). Sinofski was an evil moron.
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Good to hear from someone who was valiantly trying to create apps for this platform. I always wondered why developers never flocked to the MS platform since it always seemed wide open with not a lot of competition compared to the IOS and Android platforms.
Thanks for laying bare why it failed so badly.
This reminds me of a Timer app I downloaded when I had a HD8 that didn’t actually alert you when your time was up because of the way the native Alarm SDK was written (something to do with being unable to dispatch an alarm notification at exactly a given time). It made things...difficult.
> at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android
Not only is this untrue for years past, it's still untrue (See Continuum + UWP)
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.
I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.
I was a student who had won a Lumia 800 around May of 2012. There was a promotion where anyone who submitted 4 apps to the appstore would get a phone - no 'win' involved, a guaranteed phone. It was one of the best promotions I'd ever seen, and I promptly churned out 4 soundboard apps in a week.
This is unfortunately true, but it isn't representative of the entire effort put forth to acquire apps. I was part of the Microsoft org who was doing this at the time. We were split between breadth engagements (one to many like at universities or hackathons) and depth engagements (one to one). I was working depth engagements helping established companies port existing iOS and Android apps to Windows. The amount of investment from Microsoft in those depth engagements ranged from me helping out with technical barriers for a couple days to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives and development effort. It was all about how desirable that name or brand was on other platforms.
Did everything they could...
Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s
It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.
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Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!"
No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.
It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best.
You're 100% right, MS beat MS.
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The problem with WP was that it was late and offered nothing very special to consumers over android/iOS (and ya, I loved my 920). Consumers had no reason to buy it, developers had no reason to dev for it, a huge vicious circle that would have been difficult to break under the best of circumstances. The war was lost when the WinMo 7 team decided to after Blackberry in 2007, ignoring the iPhone as consequential, requiring that dev/design reset later that was just too late.
Man the more comments I read the more I begin to remember. There was ONE dev who was churning out VERY high quality apps to popular platforms. I think Snapchat or Instagram was what he got known for. Instead of MS embracing his work and helping it flourish, they let him get taken down by a C&D.
LOTS of people got heated when that happened.
Rudy Hyn
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>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?
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-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...
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For a small number of core apps. If they have invested heavily and put their best engineers to work on high quality core apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger etc (maybe it would be 15-20 apps 90% of people install on their phones), they would have had a much better shot at gaining momentum.
Other smaller apps would have followed and been made by independent developers but you need to cover the apps almost everybody is using and make them comparable feature and quality/performance wise to iOS and Android versions.
Number one thing most people do on their new phone is download Facebook/Messenger/Twitter. If those apps suck they will immediately have a very bad impression and will switch back to iOS or Android as soon as they get a chance.
This was the strategy that Apple followed when OS X first came out.
Third party developers were moving slowly (or not at all) so Apple started developing and giving away (or selling) apps that showed off what you could do with the new platform.
They developed Safari when Microsoft lost interest in further development of Internet Explorer. The iLife suite had iTunes, iCal, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb and GarageBand. The iWork suite had Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. They created (or bought) professional apps like Logic Pro, Final Cut, Shake, Motion and Aperture.
If you have a new platform and third party developers don't step up, then you need to start filling those holes yourself in a way that shows off your platform's advantages, and keep at it.
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.)
Not just one app. They would need Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and a number of other staple apps.
Usage numbers for FB are not that far behind IE. Perhaps they should have invested a proportional amount.
Intead they staffed their quality dev team on the Windows Mail app and Skype...
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.
You don't know how untrue this is, couple of things. First lets start with this qoute
"According to Kantar's October 2013 report, Windows Phone accounted for 10.2% of all smartphone sales in Europe and 4.8% of all sales in the United States."
and then this one
"Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America."
Lastly, do you not remember the launch of the iPhone? Not only was it only available in the US, you could only get it on AT&T.
There can be many reasons Windows Phone failed, but what you've mentioned isn't one of them.
But you're not competing with the iPhone of ten years ago. You're competing with the iPhone of today. It's difficult but in the end just excuses.
Windows phones were never a serious competitor. It just wasn't that important to the life and death of Microsoft and the result, from a business organizational perspective, is very much expected.
Consider that his perception might explain why those numbers are so awful. It's perfectly possible for the phones to be accessible to those kind of numbers of users and still be totally unavailable in the outlets a huge proportion of potential customers would look for them.
E.g. I live in the UK, and I can't remember ever having seen a Windows phone in the stores. I'm sure they're available, because I've seen people use them now and again. But if they were available in the stores I've been in, they were hidden away.
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yeah iphone was launched in 2007. We are in 2017 and if you want to take marketshare from your competitors then you need to be releasing your products in all major markets. Not a couple of them.
Windows phone was quite popular in Asia yet it died due to lack of devices.
My mum still rocks an HTC HD7 tho.
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You're being very disingenuous with the numbers. That 10% marketshare, in a few European countries, was mostly composed of cheap subsidized phones. That business model was not sustainable and subsequently collapsed.
Didn't the iPhone launch US-only?
It doesn’t matter. Subsequent iPhones are launched globally.
Microsoft does not launch subsequent products globally.
The surface takes many many months to reach many parts of Asia. Surface studio is only in a hand full of countries. Surface laptop is only in a handful of countries. Surface book is almost non existent.
The only thing Microsoft makes that it launches well is the Xbox.
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Original yes, but it also launched only on AT&T in US as well and wasn't all that successful. The real uptick in popularity started with IPhone 3G (with AppStore) which was available world wide.
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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.
> 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.
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We needed quality control as well, something which is very lacking at the moment. The sheer amount of bugs I hit trying to get my daughter's Lumia 650 up was ridiculous.
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.
I'm not sure what your beef with Windows as a client OS is but if you're saying that the UI should be dumbed down, remember how the attempt to do so with Win8 backfired and that Microsoft quickly reverted most of those changes in Win8.1.
As the older generation is dying off / retiring, the percentage of people who have been using a computer for a long time has increased immensely, the "secretary who can't figure out copy/paste" issue is becoming less relevant every day. These days the only people I need to help do basic tasks in Windows are my retired parents.
I don't see how an iOS-like UI would be an improvement for virtually anything I can imagine doing on a Windows PC.
Increasingly, I'm having trouble with interns who don't know basic computer interface paradigms because they've never used real desktop operating systems, just a ton of phones and tablets.
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> the "secretary who can't figure out copy/paste" issue is becoming less relevant every day.
Well, yeah, since the non-executive secretaries have been replaced by Office and network drives, essentially.
I didn’t say “make iOS”.
What I’m saying is that an operating environment built around Office and its functions would be more useful than the cruft built around Windows that is mostly redundant.
Windows is a boat anchor on Office.
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Outlook+Exchange is really the thing keeping Microsoft alive.
And Active Directory. I mean, I haven't found another platform yet that allows a sysadmin to control 10,000+ computers at the OS level simultaneously via one checkbox.
Clear area for disruption here. But it's IT stuff, so no one wants to touch it because it's not a cool selfie app.
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Nah. Azure revenue is growing dramatically every year.
For now. Some of the younger people aren't having any of that shit these days.
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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.
Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.
Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that...
They could do it, though. They could.
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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.)
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.
They even held a funeral for their competitors devices: https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-win...
This didn't age well.
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.
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.
I'll file that next to the windows 7 release party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
Oh god, I forgot all about this. How was this only 8 years ago? I love how, at 0:38, you can see the guy on the left covering up a laugh.
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What is the deal with that camera work, hey guys, try focusing on the person talking.
Without a doubt this stunt marked the absolute death knell for WP...my God the arrogance of those people.
That is sickeningly hilarious.
The walk of shame.
Goodness gracious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
That move was likely political. Half the leaders internally wanted to let it die but to shift blame they let "the other team" launch it anyways to let it fail and say "told you so".
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!
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.
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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?
"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-a...
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.
In your comment there are many uses of I. But that isn't how other people generally use their phones - if you can be bothered to look at any data.
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In what industry do you work?
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> They may have an additional 25 to 30 apps installed, but only five of those are heavily used. The five non-native apps vary from user to user
Doesn't that suggest that while individual users only use a few apps, the union of apps that see significant use is much larger? So you need a wide variety of high quality apps to please a majority of users.
So it's not "none of my apps are available". It's more like "that one app that my gym uses for booking is iOS/Android only" or whatever. Finding a decent WM8 podcast app was virtually impossible back when I had a Lumia, IIRC.
The data you posted do not support the claim “People don't even use apps”, but instead only “most individual users do not regularly use a large number of apps”. But that doesn't mean that either the small number they use frequently or the larger number that they use infrequently are unimportant to the overall utility they derive from their phone, or that there aren't a large number of apps used regularly across any given platform.
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.
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.
> Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.
Anecdote from a lot of my friends, a lot of use use flashcard type apps to help learn languages and things like memrise etc... Dictionary apps to get word translations and so on.
So I'm going to place that article under: perhaps true in general, but not overly constructive to my group of people.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's very true for Windows Phone. The animations definitely got irritating.
> 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.
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.
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.
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Wow, I didn't even know Intel was a RAM chip maker before doing microprocessors... or that Microsoft started with BASIC. Thanks for the historical notes!
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> Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Information changes but a UI should be static, a UI that changes based on what is available is a recipe for a poor user experience. I have a hard enough time navigating rows of icons (as opposed to a list of app names), I don't need the icons changing randomly.
Aside from that, one of the missing features of tiles was interactivity, on android I've had an MP3 player widget on my home screen since I first got an HTC hero and playing music is a core feature for my phone. As flashy as tiles were they didn't have that level of functionality.
They tried everything, except for open standards, foss, focus on user privacy or anything that would have have made them different.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes I imagine some of these exist now, I purchased that device some years ago now
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.
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.
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.
Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.
Years ago, Microsoft indeed paid to have my app written for Windows Mobile. Totally free and hands-off, i just have to agree and it will be done.
(It was in Malaysia, and my website was very popular then.)
Drum Kit? I'm guessing $10k just wasn't worth it for such a hugely-popular iOS app?
Yup. It wasn't worth it at that time.
10k seems reasonable enough to port it. Why didn't you?
My app was doing really well in the App Store, and Apple was featuring it on billboards and TV ads. As an indie developer, it was the best thing I could have hoped for. I didn't want to mess up that relationship with Apple in any way. Being anti-MS throughout my youth probably didn't help either.
That might cover the initial development costs, but then you are signing up for a lifetime of support. $10k doesn't help much if there aren't enough recurring revenues. It sucks to launch an app then let it languish and have to kill it a year or two later.
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.
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I wouldn't help Microsoft for $10000000. I'm sure many others feel the same.
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10K is nothing for a decent mobile developer in the U.S. Even at a very low salary of $120K in a major metropolitan city. That's a month's salary. Could he have ported the app in a month working 160 hours?
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.
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-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.
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.
A good amount of the "key apps" are free anyway, so a lower margin wouldn't have helped there.
I remember they started by introducing the same sort of toll than Apple. That was them shooting themselves in the foot.
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.
>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.
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.
Most apps make a pittance.
What does that have to do with anything?
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
They practically did. I bought a Windows phone for $30 a couple years 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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
That's what I thought too. But the top 100 might be different for different people.
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/9np72dfcvk...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I think Microsoft could greatly improve developer support. I've sent my Edge extension in April and still have no response.
man, the windows app store was a joke.
a teenager could write something better in node/angular in a week
>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.
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".
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.
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
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...
It's almost like if you shit on developers for a decade people don't wanna bother with your new platform.
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.
I've got one in my pocket right now: Asus Zenfone 2. It just runs regular Android. Even has an "Intel Inside" logo on the back.
Windows has never had great dynamic scaling, so trying to run regular apps on a phone would be a nightmare of tiny click targets. Metro apps would scale better, but that was the whole point of UWP.
IMO they've given up slightly too early. They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer, or various other things, but Microsoft just can't handle a market where they aren't dominant. The only way they could leverage their dominance would be to break Exchange ActiveSync and say "if you want your calendar on your phone, it has to be a Windows phone".
And Intel have pulled back from the low-power area (mobiles, Edison) because they're not competitive there. Maybe the same "can't function when not market leader" problem.
> They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer
MS had Android emulation[0] in the works for Windows Mobile 10 but then decided to cancel it citing it was "unnecessary".
[0]https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
> Android-on-Windows compatibility layer
This was one of the big mistakes made by OS/2 when they were competing against Windows. They created a compatibility layer for Windows applications, which meant that developers never wrote native apps for their platform, leading to a very poor user experience and gave Windows a leg-up on its competition. I doubt Microsoft wants to make the same mistake.
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...
That's always been a weakness with Microsoft's strategy. First with a stylus for Windows Mobile, later with the ribbon in Office.
> 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.
> 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://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh2029...
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Exactly. Microsoft is abandoning phone, but I imagine they'll still exist in the business-tablet area.
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> Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything?
Nonsense
https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an...
https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...
That UX will just be amazing