[Toutouxc]

Actually Windows Phone was pretty much killed by Microsoft's lack of marketing, developer incentives and general incompetence, the OSes (7 and 8 mainly, 10 was weird) were incredibly smooth, fast and well designed. For a short while (in between most popular apps gaining WP support and then dropping it) it was IMO the best mobile experience available. You could get a dirt-cheap low-end phone like the Lumia 520 and it just worked. Then there were the AMOLED Lumias (Windows Phone was almost all black!), good cameras, the future looked really promising. Well. Good times were had.

[theshrike79]

Never forget how MS decided to prop up their WP app store numbers by running classes that ended up in the projects being submitted (and approved) to the store.

The amount of utter shit in the WP store was astounding. It was like if every single 0 star GitHub project had been submitted to a store for everyone to download.

[fmajid]

My father wanted a smartphone but didn't want to pay Apple premiums, so I told him to get a Windows Phone because they guaranteed software updates, unlike Android's dismal situation.

He was very happy with it, then it was EOL-ed and WhatsApp stopped working on it (I consider that a feature, not a bug, but for some odd reason he disagrees). So I set him up with a LineageOS Pocophone F1. He still misses the simplicity of the Windows Phone UI, though.

[giantrobot]

I don't remember any WP8 phones actually being a good experience. The high end Lumias had good cameras...once the camera app eventually launched. The low end Lumias were absolutely terrible in every respect. They were dirt cheap because they were garbage. The App Store was a joke and what little software it had was awful.

The Metro/Modern/Whatever UI looked good in screen shots. In actual use the tiles just ate up a lot of screen real estate and rarely refreshed their content when expected. The UI inside apps was equally brain dead with touch elements often lacking borders. So you'd have to hope you aimed your finger perfectly on an icon. Because the UI could become unresponsive for unexpected reasons, especially on garbage phones, even if you hit an element it wasn't clear if the app was actually responding.

Windows Phone 8 and up was a dumpster fire. The highest end phones were just okay and didn't really hold a candle to the Apple and Android flagships of the time.

[rasz]

You couldnt watch a TV show in 2013-2015 without everyone and the dog using product placement Lumias.