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Comment by indrora

20 days ago

Windows 10 Mobile was good.

The entire developer experience was fantastic and the thing that killed it was a lack of desire from the upper leadership when it felt like they couldn't compete with the duopoly.

The developer experience was trash.

Did you have a wince app? Too bad, throw away all that and rebuild for wp7.

Do you want do anything useful? Actually, you better wait for wp7.5.

Oh look, we have a totally new thing with WP8. Upgrade to the newest framework so you can use the WP8 features... Oh, but you still need to build for the old framework for WP7. Hey, how about WP8.1, kind of the same deal.

My personal favorite though was WM10; you now need to build a Universal app that only runs on the very small number of WM10 phones... If you want to run on WP7 and WP8 which still have more sales, a universal app doesn't run there. Also, even though we said WP8 phones would be able to upgrade, either we changed our mind, or the experience is so bad most people won't. And the cherry on top... Users who upgrade from 8 to 10 might need to delete and reinstall the app, otherwise it will just show the loading dots.

Did we mention, we decided we didn't need engineers in Test in the run up to WM10? Couldn't possibly be why the release was terrible.

  • It's incredible that by the end of it, the WM rollercoaster made us actually miss WinCE. If you had have told us that initially none of us would have believed you. WM had so much potential and was just totally botched.