[pwdisswordfish]

I loved my Lumia 920, and if only there were apps, I would not be using iPhone right now. Major things I've missed that were available on android/iOS:

banking app - some other banks had an app for WP, but I didn't want to switch banks

public transit route planner - there were some, iOS and android had THE app for my city with really good bus arrival estimates

official public transit app - I couldn't buy tickets from my phone

official city parking app - had to go to parking teller and pay there in friggin cash, now I just set the zone and am done with it

even the most popular taxi app was not available

Hearthstone - I like this rng card game

[zyme]

I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast.

My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same.

A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost.

Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win.

Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...