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by hyperpallium2 1910 days ago
Yes. Maybe if MS strategically invested in excellent, free tools, Windows Phone would have the best apps, and win most customers. "Developers, developers, developers" was right direction, insufficient magnitude.

Note that Android chose Java, not for its performance on constrained devices, but for... developers.

I really can't see how to tell how plausible this is, that MS Phone could have won, through better long-term strategy, of free dev tools.
2 comments
std_badalloc 1910 days ago
As someone who did cross platform development for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone way back when, Windows Phone did actually have the superior dev experience by far (talking about WinPhone 7+ here). It wasn't free, but neither was iPhone development.

They didn't have any market share though, so there wasn't much money to be made making apps for them. I suspect they failed because they launched 2-3 years after Android and iPhone, so the other platforms had accumulated the network effects of an existing user base and app ecosystem that they couldn't catch up to. And they tried hard, IIRC, Microsoft offered to build a Snapchat client for Snap Inc, and to pay them to be allowed to do so, but were denied.

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eecc 1910 days ago
No, MS Phone became irrelevant because there's no space on the market. Indeed there's barely space for more than 1...

Apple managed to claw its position out of pure first-mover-advantage, and it's choice to build on top of a proprietary API. Had they gone with some HTML/js morass, it would have been easily dogged down and ground to dust on the interoperability battlefield.

Microsoft could wrestle Android out of Google's hands though... I mean, why not spinning their own Microsoft-oriented build around AOSP?

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bigbizisverywyz 1910 days ago
>and it's choice to build on top of a proprietary API. Had they gone with some HTML/js morass, >it would have been easily dogged down and ground to dust on the interoperability battlefield.

Actually, initially Apple expected people to deploy apps as webapps and provide links on the homescreen. There was no ios SDK. Only after a lot of loud complaining by devs did Apple release any tools or an SDK for ios native apps.

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