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by pndy 369 days ago
Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point.

Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.

The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.

Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.

Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.

2 comments

YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)
The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible.

At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.