Comment by untog
8 years ago
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!
The iPhone opens to something like the Program Manager (but with little numbers showing which apps have active notifications).
Android opens to something like a Desktop, with some combination of Widget apps and/or app shortcuts. Mine is configured to show a clock, mini calendar, and weather. Incoming e-mails, SMSes, or other messages are visible in the notification bar. I could configure it to show me little previews of messages, but I chose not to.
Android has supported home screen widgets and activity shortcuts since forever. Live tiles are hardly better, they're just a very Metro-y approach to the same feature.
There used to be a homescreen replacement app for Android called SlideScreen [0] (homepage is active, but the app is abandoned) that would try to give you as much information at-a-glance as possible.
[0] http://slidescreenhome.com
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.