[hedgehog]

It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity.

Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.

[xorcist]

There was also Tizen, FirefoxOS and a whole slew of others. It was a remarkable time.

But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time.

What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going for it was that it could have had much better long time support and not just for hardware for software. Linux famously do not break userspace, and can regularly run 30 year old applications. For a phone you would be surprised if a 3 year old app worked.

Microsoft did this so much worse than both Apple or Android, even if they all suffer from it. Every release of the operating system came not just with new design language, never earth-shattering but often interesting, but new GUI toolkits and application packaging. Just a recompile of your application often wasn't enough, you were expected to rewrite your application to fit in with the new. They really shot themselves in the foot with that, and they did it over and over again despite never having leading market share and everbody seeing where things were heading. It was (and perhaps still is) probably the only way they could operate as a company.

The vanilla Linux-based platforms mentioned above had their own problems which should be obvious from the naming scheme alone, which would have compounded had their marketshare grown bigger. It was a forkfest. But that's the issue with corporate open source, there is rightfully an inherent skepticism where a single company dominates what is an open source project. This is also why Linus never took a job with the big Linux providers. It wasn't for a lack of opportunitites, but he knew that had he worked for Red Hat, people would always suspect even technical decisions to be made for the benefit of his employer. The most successful open source projects are vendor neutral. That is not in telecom companies culture, they had a very hard time understanding that and tend to form alliances instead. Not the same thing.

[hedgehog]

Once native apps became important Microsoft didn't have a chance, the basis for Apple's success was in place back in 2003-2005. Apple had a big head start on what is now the standard phone template (always-on cell data, capacitive touch, etc), and based on the experience and success of the iTunes / iPod platform they found leverage to negotiate a unique deal where they controlled OS updates and the app store (instead of the carriers). They also had a lot of experience with OpenGL composited UI from OS X which translated to a (relatively) good GLES implementation on iPhone even though they didn't originally have any kind of public SDK. Very useful for games. Now I think there are some groups that are hoping LLM-based agents will upset the dominance of the app store model... I'm skeptical but we'll see.

[crooked-v]

I still fondly remember my Palm Pre. It felt like something with the potential for as much UX gloss and functionality as the iPhone but much easier to make small apps for.

[storus]

Windows Phone aesthetics was repulsive to most people at that time; we finally got TrueColor 4k screens and all MS could do was to use 10 colors everywhere and start the flat fad that destroyed UX on most systems. What a waste.

[hedgehog]

I don't think that's quite accurate, the screens of the time were more like 480px wide and I don't think most people had a strong aesthetic opinion. Just look at Android. The major problem is that whatever app you cared about, whether it was your bank, Facebook, sport news, or Uber, or Google Maps, or whatever, it was on iOS and maybe Android. So at least in rich countries the decision tree was: buy iOS if you can afford it, buy Android if you can't. Apple basically got extremely lucky that the native app thing took off instead of their original vision of everything via the browser.

[calgoo]

I loved the tiled Windows phone ui, felt years ahead of the already aging android look and the god awful iOS look. I use android and iOS daily, and luckily I have been able to add a tiled launcher, with live tiles in android.

Also, had ms continued production and not burned goodwill at each turn, as well as skipped the crapshow that was windows 8, we could at least had had 3 providers instead of two.