[hakfoo]

I wonder if part of it was that they filled a gap that was sort of broken.

Low-end Android phones used to suck. Hell, even high-end ones. There was a lot of jank, battery life was mediocre, software looked and felt patched together.

Windows Phone delivered a really good experience even on the bottom-of-the-line hardware, Things were smooth, and most stuff (because it was either first-party or from committed devs) was built to fit the design language.