Remember that you're talking about a company that had the problem of a lack of apps/developer attention on their original mobile platform (Windows Phone 7) and decided that the solution was to reset the ecosystem in a backwards-incompatible way... twice. (first with WP8, then with W10).
After that kind of stupidity, I'm not sure anything else would be much of a surprise. It saddens me to say this because Windows Phone could've actually been a great platform and alternative to iOS/Android had idiots not been in charge of it.
Yes those resets were bad, but another factor was arrogance. They thought just because they're the ones with the dominant desktop OS, they'll automatically win the smartphone market somehow.
So if we ignore that stupid WP7 thing, they were 4 years late to the party. There were two players already in the market, the dominant one open sourcing the core of their OS, giving OEMs a lot of freedom for customization, users can sideload apps easily, the SDK was free and you could start testing on your device right away or distribute the apk directly.
Microsoft then thought it was smart to require a registration (for $$$ iirc) just for starting to use the IDE. You could only push one app to your phone, tied to your dev account, at a time. Sideloading didn't exist. That probably helped adoption a lot /s. Device pricing also didn't seem too competitive. At least with Nokia they could have done much more agressive pricing to gain market share. But the Nokia aquisition was the next stupid move: Nokia now got Windows for free while others still had to pay licensing fees, pulling a 3dfx Voodoo 3. Surprise, most switched to Android exclusively.
Instead of trying everything to get users and devs on board they copied mostly Apple's policies, who could really only get away with it since they were there first to market, and already had an established user base when Google came along and gave Android away almost for free and made copying (pirating) apps as easy as possible. Microsoft pretended they already own the place from day one.
> Microsoft then thought it was smart to require a registration (for $$$ iirc) just for starting to use the IDE. You could only push one app to your phone, tied to your dev account, at a time. Sideloading didn't exist. That probably helped adoption a lot /s.
Honestly, that probably didn't affect adoption a lot -- at least, not directly. Most users aren't developers. But it did probably scare off some developers, and the resulting lack of native apps probably hurt them quite a bit in the long run.
Now with Project Reunion, for those that don't know, is basically merging the Win32 and UWP worlds, by moving the UWP stack outside of the kernel into Win32 userspace frameworks.
It feels like going back to Windows 7 development stack, alongside an improved COM runtime and eventually in a few years down the line pretend that Windows 8 linage never happened.
My second device, and main phone while travelling is still a trusty Lumia.
I'm not even sure what's the recommended API to write Windows apps at this juncture. It might be more interesting to ask which APIs are being use by well-known desktop applications.
Just Win32, it is the only one that wont be abandoned in a couple of years when someone at Microsoft decides to make a new UI stack that will solve all the problems all of their previous stacks had.
Here is a good test to see if some new UI functionality from Microsoft will catch on: can you use it with CreateWindow and/or pure C without feeling like someone is hammering nails under your fingernails (so that it can also be bound to all the languages out there that have C interop and/or existing toolkits can build on top of the new functionality without rewriting everything from scratch)? If so, then it'll be UI functionality that you can rely on for the future.
If not, just ignore and stick with Win32. Microsoft will do the same anyway.
>Now with Project Reunion, for those that don't know, is basically merging the Win32 and UWP worlds, by moving the UWP stack outside of the kernel into Win32 userspace frameworks.
Interesting, I hadn't heard about that until now. Would this make it possible to run UWP software through Wine? That hasn't been possible so far.
> Now with Project Reunion, for those that don't know, is basically merging the Win32 and UWP worlds
From what I have read of project Reunion, my prediction would be this technology will be a flop.
From what I can tell the parts of Win32 that are supported are the non-GUI elements.
For most Win32 applications the GUI is tightly bound to the application logic and from what I can tell Reunion is not going to help fix that.
Now again I might be wrong, but if the Reunion solution is to replace Win32 GUI with UWP, just keeping the non GUI Win32 parts, then I would say you might as well throw away the whole application and start again.
If someone out there has used Reunion to migrate/modernism a Win32 application then I would love them to share their experience.
OS was great. Apps ecosystem sucked though, they really needed to have Android apps compatibility mode till they gained enough market share.
We would have three players then, instead of two players and maybe some great devices from players like Nokia.
It annoys me so much that MS failed in this, just like they have failed in premium laptops. One player dominates the premium smartphones and laptops in some markets by a good margin.
While official apps were nonexistant or severely lacking, a guy named Rudy or so made a lot of 6-branded apps that worked better than the originals on Android at the time. The snapchat, instagram etc clients he made were really good. While at the same time the snapchat app for Android constantly crashed and had really bad image quality (a screenshot of the camera seeker or so??). Of course, the apps were simpler then. Mostly images and a feed / chat, not all this AR and advanced filters. Not sure one could compete today without official backing.
But I really do miss some of the apps I had on my Lumia 920. The rebuilding of apps and new thinking about UI made some stellar apps. The HERE maps were so much better than Google Maps still is (and GMaps only gets worse and slower each iteration), and the HERE public transport app (Transit?) had a UI layout and interaction I've never seen anyone else have, but which was really intuitive and nice to use. WP8 also had a reddit reader that's far above anything else I've tried since.
While I never liked the look of the earlier iPhone UI widgets (blue gradient top row with back button etc) at least most of the apps worked consistently at the time. And that was even better with WP8, the way one could almost see the next screen and could swipe etc worked really well. Now however, apps are made with their own design and not made for the OS they run on. So they look the same on iOS and Android, and out of place on both. So I have one way of interacting with Instagram, and then a completely different way of interacting with Google's material apps.
> While official apps were nonexistant or severely lacking, a guy named Rudy or so made a lot of 6-branded apps that worked better than the originals on Android at the time. The snapchat, instagram etc clients he made were really good.
Several of them were taken down. Snapchat notoriously refused to develop for Windows Phone and refused any unofficial client.
Yeah, and around the same time most 3rd party Twitter clients got shafted (on all platforms).
As for Snapchat, someone at my university made accounts that would repost snaps sent to it and some other stuff. It quickly became a huge thing, and a kind of mini social network of stuff happening on campus. As they used Snapchat APIs directly for this they were quickly banned, though. It took years before Snapchat added similar features, but for me those felt DoA and no one uses them. Sad when innovation is quenched. Instead they went on to make their own app, Gobi or something.
Some devs really loved the platform and made fantastic apps for it. I remember really great third party Twitter clients as well, but there is only so much you can do if you are not a first party app. You are not going to be intimated of internal API changes. Limits can be imposed on your apps by the API provider. If I remember correctly there wasn't a good Youtube first party client for a while as well.
> But I really do miss some of the apps I had on my Lumia 920
Was it Lumia 920 itself that had the best camera of that gen? It just feels sad that the Lumia family doesn't exist anymore.
> Now however, apps are made with their own design and not made for the OS they run on.
While great for third party devs, this really sucks. Everything felt as a part of the OS with the really fresh UI.
I didn't end up publishing an app but really loved the developer tooling as well, it was very easy to write apps at that time compared to other platforms. Also, for gaming with things like XNA framework for games which a lot of indie devs were familiar with it would have been a great platform.
It annoys me so much that MS failed in this, just like they have failed in premium laptops
Not sure if they did (literally, I don't know the numbers) but laptops like Dell XPS or Surface Pro are still premium range I think, maybe just not as polished as MBP, and do seem to have quite some market share?
“they really needed to have Android apps compatibility mode till they gained enough market share”
I think Microsoft remembers how that approach worked for OS/2 and Windows compatibility mode.
Developers would think “we don’t need to develop for Windows phone” and users would think “I’ll buy a real android phone and not a phone that emulates it, and lags its software by half a year, and will have bugs”
the way to get market share is to combine two paths
- support apps from as many popular platforms as possible
- provide developers a framework native to your platform that gives their apps support for other platforms with zero effort
After that kind of stupidity, I'm not sure anything else would be much of a surprise. It saddens me to say this because Windows Phone could've actually been a great platform and alternative to iOS/Android had idiots not been in charge of it.