[jonasdegendt]

I got a ton of free Nokia phones back in the day through these weird incentive programs. I was told at a meetup by one of the employees that each Microsoft division was to get N number of new apps in their local store each quarter, and they’d have developer programs along the line of “publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get a free Lumia phone.”

There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zero form of quality control. I was a freshman in college at the time, could barely code my way out of a leetcode at that point and I’d have five calculator-esque apps ready to go whenever my local Microsoft division dropped a Tweet saying a new program was live since there was only a limited amount of phones.

Felt real good for me and my buddies but ironically we were left with phones that had these junk riddled app stores, amazing hardware devices though.

But yeah, Balmer did great developing the B2B side of things, consumer devices wasn’t it.

[spookie]

To be fair, let's not forget that Google had their apps in there and then got them out. At least the YouTube-like app I used had YouTube premium features at no cost, I guess.

[whaleofatw2022]

The main 'premium' feature I remember from that app, being the ability to play the audio/video while running another app, and not having restrictions about WHAT you could do that with.

Honestly that's a bullshit feature to lock behind premium, given a PC can do it without.

But then Google more or less gave them the 'fuck you' and made the app unusable. Which I still feel has some antitrust connotations, as they waited until the platform became competent to do so.