Comment by toast0

Crappy apps might be a problem, but what was a bigger problem was that every major release of the platform came with a new application framework, and developers would have to pick between using the old framework to keep existing customers and live with suboptimal experience on new devices, use the new one and drop support for old devices, or spend even more effort on supporting both (or really all three). Compare to iOS, where most users update to latest OS within months, or desktop Windows where win32 works for everything, or Android where version gated features don't usually require massive changes to enable.

It would have been nice if they didn't copy Apple so hard, leaving out copy and paste and restricting browsers in the store weren't the best decisions for an upstart platform. Mozilla had been excited to port Firefox early on, but Microsoft told them no, so WP users were stuck with Mobile IE and much later in WM10, the amazingly worse Mobile Edge.