Comment by shp0ngle
2 years ago
I mean the Nokia-Microsoft phones were great
Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such.
But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified
Were they? I had a Lumia with WP7 and it had nearly zero apps, zero multitasking (accidentally click on the Bing button and your app state is lost) and near zero things to do. I remember a very visible metaphor for the whole device was the calendar's month view: it literally showed "Lorem ipsum" for the days you had some events. Supposedly due to performance concerns, and this lasted to WP8 as well.
The only cool thing was the grid but that only goes skin deep. Otherwise I hated the phone. Maybe WP8+ devices were better but WP7 was a piece of crap. I didn't want to try WP8 and got myself a Jolla instead.
The market's only thought about the OS is what features it supports. And lots of them are provided by 3rd party apps. Lots of people switch from Android to iPhone and back. People mostly just want to keep using their TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, ...
It's the app developers (and their companies) who wouldn't be happy with a third option, because the existing two cause enough problems, just think about how many frameworks for cross-platform app development exist, they were created for a reason..., and even with them you still have to do OS-specific stuff to tackle different app store policies, different privacy features, updated APIs breaking your app on new OS versions... or you can have two entirely separate teams working on two separate codebases and try to keep the feature parity...