[Divver]

Before I joined Apple I was at Microsoft and I did use a Windows Phone. It was a Lumia 1520.

And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))

Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.

But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.

I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.

And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.

To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.

[jobu]

> Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.

Agreed. We developed a couple apps way back in Windows Phone 7, and the UI was slick and stylish. The developer tools were fantastic - very fast and easy to create decent apps. Unfortunately we didn't see much ROI for those apps, and then Microsoft decided everyone needed to redo their apps for Windows Phone 8. It was an easy choice to drop support for those apps and stop all development for Windows Phone at that point. The biggest problem people had with Windows Phone was the lack of apps, and it seemed like MS caused that problem themselves.

[mobilio]

Yup!

But they do this with version 6.5 then "rewrote apps" for 7, and then "rewrite apps" for 8 and now for 10.

It's easy to understand why devs are pissed-off from that decisions.

PS: I forgot fiasco with 7.5 and upgrade to 7.9 and 8.0

[pjc50]

I guess they listened to all those people saying "the bad thing about Microsoft is the great lengths they go to for backwards compabilitity!"

[kettlecorn]

8 -> 8.1 was also a similar transition.

There was a period where targeting the 8.0 APIs meant you had access to one set of features and targeting the 8.1 set of APIs meant you were missing certain features but gaining others. The constant rewrites was a nightmare from the developer perspective and prevented any traction being gained.

The story of Windows Phone is full of similar bone-headed decisions in which Microsoft continuously pisses off people trying to love it.

It's been a while but here are a few things that stand out to me as being particurarly bad:

Many Windows Phone users came from Zune, so they were super into music. The Windows Phone 7 -> 8 transition made the music app into a horrifically bad experience missing so many features it was laughably bad compared to other platforms.

The flagship for a period of time was the Lumia 1020. Nokia wrote all sorts of interesting applications for it that were later unsupported or removed when Microsoft acquired Nokia.

Microsoft shipped no flagship for a really long period of time (other than the flop of the Lumia Icon available only on Verizon) and so the "super fans" had the choice of sticking with their Lumia 1020 or 'upgrading' to a cheaper build quality and worse camera Windows Phone that had better specs. Eventually when Windows 10 for phone rolled around they promised 1020 users that Windows 10 would support their phones, but eventually they gave in and announced they couldn't make it work. At that point there wasn't a fantastic successor to the 1020 from the camera perspective, so many users just left.

For a period of time the Lumia 520 was the best low cost ($50 - $100!) smartphone on the market. People actually really liked it, but once again it was unsupported when it came time to upgrade to Windows 10. This meant that a large portion of the Windows Phone install base was fragmented. Microsoft decided they didn't want to win the low-end, they wanted to win the high end (high m argin!) so they stopped making cheap phones like the 520.

I think Microsoft's problem is they continuously changed strategies all the time when they weren't seeing returns. They wanted Windows Phone to be "Microsoft scale" instantly. It seems they felt that as one of the world's largest software companies they should be instantly successful and if they were not then it was better to refocus their efforts elsewhere they could make more money. When they didn't see instant sucesss with Windows Phone there would be a leadership and strategy change resulting in whip-lash for users and developers.

I really think they had to take the under dog approach and make a few users love them, then a few more, then a few more. At the time there would have been a class of users for whom the benefits of the platform would outweigh getting the trendiest apps. Microsoft had enormous opportunity: Android phones were unusably poor on low end phones, iPhones were really expensive and more restrictive. The "app gap" to me really seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Even a company as large as Microsoft can't brute force a grass roots sort of thing like an app development community. The "app gap" is used by many to excuse Microsoft's failure to not develop a competitive platform. From my perspective Microsoft's desire to have instant success, to make a device for everyone, meant they made a platform that ultimately failed.

The crazy thing is they still haven't pronounced it dead yet. Perhaps they have a final hail mary device they're going to try, or perhaps some lingering arrogance means Microsoft would rather leave Windows Phone on life support then declare it dead.

[pjmlp]

Fully agree with your point of view.

For a while WP devices actually had more market share than iPhone on some European countries, because they were the only affordable alternative to Android.

With all these missteps they managed to drive both the consumers that enjoyed WP, and Windows developers that had fun coding apps for it.

I have this gut feeling that since Windows 10 tablets and hybrids are actually more successful than Android based ones, they would like to try a "mini-tablet" that can make phone calls.

But they burned us so many times, that most likely it will be UWP apps that happen to run on such "mini-tablet" by accident, than being made explicitly for it.

[mobilio]

I agree on 100% on that.

They also make statement this spring "no new devices this year" and this is yet-another-example-of-market-alienification.

[baldfat]

Years to late. They could have been a real contender if they came out 3 years earlier.

[discreditable]

> Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes.

It amazes me that every model Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga I've worked with (four generations now) has some issue along this line. Every refresh requires some driver troubleshooting on my part to find the one that fixes machines that sleep and don't wake up.

[drzaiusapelord]

Outside of their business line, Lenovo completely phones it in. I never recommend Lenovo for consumers. Heck, even their think-series laptops and desktops often have critical bios and driver updates shortly after release that need to be installed or the machine will bluescreen, lock up, drop wifi, etc.

At work, I only buy Thinkpads and Think-series PCs after they've aged 6+ months. I can't imagine how people get by being early adopters. We early adopted a Carbon laptop once. Borderline unusable wifi and trackpad. It took 6-12 months for Lenovo to release the updates that fixed these issues, and even then the trackpad never felt right to me (misses taps, misses drags, fails to detect two fingers, etc.)

[discreditable]

Their business line is what I was referring to. I've never worked with their consumer line.

Every generation has some variety of stupid power management issue. Their 2014 & 2015 model ThinkPad Yoga both had a problem where there was some fault with the system board that frequently caused the trackpad to stop working after sleep/wake. Fix was to replace the system board. The 2014-2017 models have all had sleep/wake bugs that involved a driver and/or BIOS updates to resolve later (often not completely). It doesn't help either that they regularly leave critical drivers out of their SCCM packages.

[justacat]

I had real hopes for the Windows Phones, I thought they were really exploring a unique approach to the whole thing. I'm on Apple right now and it is the Apple ecosystem that keeps me here more than anything.