| Usability. I strongly disagree that Android has much of that, and I suspect that a great many Android users simply don't know any better. Windows Phone really is that much better. Rant: My first smartphone was a Lumia, and then when it broke i went to a Sony Xperia (with a rather clean Android 4.3 on it). I never even realized how well-designed WP was until I went to Android. Examples: - Operation. Nearly all of WP is easy to operate with just a thumb, single-handed. All important controls are either near the bottom or reachable by swiping. On Android, I have to reach to the top for all kinds of stuff. It's simply, apparently, an Android design pattern to put a bar with buttons on the top, as far away from my hand as possible. This is plainly ridiculous. On WP, there's a clear relationship between "how important is this action" and "how close is it to the bottom". As it should be. - Consistency. All well-designed WP apps work the same. Swipe left/right for different screens/tabs, touch the left-side of an item for select-boxes, operations on the bottom and more operations by selecting "...". This is the same nearly everywhere, both for built-in apps and for most well-designed apps from the store. - Cleanliness and clarity. The Xperia forced me to choose a home screen background picture, making it very difficult to read text and icons. I google-image-searched a "black.png" to work around this, but still, it's cluttered by default, and you need to do work to clean it up. Similarly, most good apps are really clean and uncluttered. I get the info I want to see or manipulate, no bullshit bells and whistles. - Quick. WP's live tiles are a perfect middle ground for me between bloated Android widgets and app-icons-only like in iPhone. My homescreen only contains the stuff i do often, with bigger buttons for stuff i do more. All this, without cluttering the UI like doing something similar on Android would do (by hand-dragging around a combination of widgets and icons). Needless to say, I went back to Windows Phone (anyone want to buy a Sony Xperia SP, btw?). Upgraded to WP 8.1, which added: - The best mobile calendar app I've ever seen. The week view is simply amazing [1]. - Fix for every single thing I want that Android had and WP hadn't: better volume controls, action center for notifications and quick access to settings, stuff like that. I'm well aware that none of the above includes the things you mention: customizability, open source, etc. WP indeed doesn't have that - it's much more like iOS in that respect. I thought I'd miss this, but with 8.1 fixing all the issues I had with WP, I realize that actually I don't want customizability, I want the thing to work great out of the box. You only need customization if what you start with sucks. On the hackability aspect though, WP app development is a very smooth experience compared to Android app dev (assuming you have a Windows computer ready somewhere). The API is very well designed and documented, and the tools are great (assuming you can stand Visual Studio). [1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/04/17/windows-phone-8-1-... |
> You only need customization if what you start with sucks.
Those two things make hard taking all of your other points seriously.