[nirvdrum]

We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household. It's an all around better experience than Android in my experience, but there wasn't much point in continuing to push the boulder up the hill. And I liked the ability to pop in a micro SD card, which Apple doesn't support.

From my vantage point, Google did everything it could to kill off Windows phone. There was the big spat over YouTube, where Google wouldn't write a native YouTube client and banned Microsoft's. Google bought SoftCard (I think?) and subsequently killed off NFC payments for Windows phones. When they bought Waze, they ceased all development for Windows mobile, allowing that application to atrophy.

There were certainly a lot of other reasons Windows mobile had difficulty. Not the least of which is developers didn't want to have to manage apps for yet another platform. It looked to me like Microsoft was making good strides there, nonetheless, with some nice tooling. I don't use more than ten apps with any regularity and there were solutions for each of them on Windows mobile, at least.

But, rather than make its apps available everywhere its users were, Google used its market position to starve a competitor. And it wasn't merely a case of deciding not to build apps for it. They took active actions to try to kill off Windows mobile before it had a chance to grow. I see no reason to believe they wouldn't do it with any other new entry. We're just stuck with a duopoly now.

[toast0]

> We just retired a Lumia 950 XL in my household.

Man, that's a lot of commitment! I gave up when an app I was using for work ended WP8 support and I updated my Lumia 640 to WM10 and wasn't happy with it (Mobile Edge is really terrible, but I already complained), I could give up that app and go back to WP8, but I wasn't willing to live with the notification center bugs in WP8 that were actually fixed in WM10. I still miss live tiles, and the janky photo uploader app I wrote. :(

[nirvdrum]

The Lumia 950 XL shipped with Windows 10 native and was Microsoft's flagship phone, so it got updates for longer. But, yeah, live tiles were great and the UI was just super smooth. The dedicated camera button was fantastic. Being able to access Office apps in Continuum was really neat. I'm sure I have the timetable wrong, but there were features in Windows 10 mobile that took years before they were available on other platforms.

For now I'm using Square Home with a Samsung Galaxy, mostly because I like the hardware options on Android better. But, with the whole industry shifting to locked down devices much like iPhones, I may very well switch back to iPhone for privacy reasons. I really liked having a viable third option. C'est la vie.

[sumedh]

> Google used its market position to starve a competitor.

They just followed Microsoft's formula.