Comment by fpig

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.