RIP Windows Phone: 2010-2017
The boys at Redmond are taking the mobile platform out behind the shed.
Microsoft officially launched its Windows Phone platform back in 2010 in an attempt to shoehorn itself into the lucrative smartphone market with Apple and Google. In October of that year, HTC delivered the first handset featuring the Windows Phone operating system, the HTC 7. The Windows Phone operating system used Microsoft’s Metro UI and offered a smattering of live tiles for its homescreen. The Metro UI was also featured in the company's largely unpopular Windows 8 desktop OS, possibly contributing to consumer hesitation towards the mobile counterpart. Windows Phone never gained traction with users or app developers and has been on life-support for years. It appears that the plug has finally been pulled.
In a tweet posted yesterday, Joe Belfiore, a Vice President in Microsoft’s operating systems group, revealed that the Windows Phone platform would see no further hardware or software feature updates and that existing users should expect nothing more than bug/security fixes going forward.
Belfiore also touched on the struggle Microsoft had getting third party developers and end users to pay attention to its baby. Maybe people would have been more willing to smile and wave at that baby if it wasn’t so ugly and unpopular. That one guy on the forum you read occasionally is going to be super-bummed about all of this.
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replyChris Jarrard posted a new article, RIP Windows Phone: 2010-2017
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I am still on my 950. Bought a replacement battery for it yesterday. I guess I should just start shopping. I was hoping to hold out until the Surface phone, but I knew it was a pipe dream anyway.
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Mostly happy with iOS so far here.
I still miss the back button because it left the side swipe gestures open to doing useful things in apps instead of just going back and some other stuff (the Windows Phone keyboard was way better)
Overall though, I think it's a net win just by having a supported system - oh and it's WAY faster at web browsing.-
I can't buy into the Apple ecosystem. Never liked it and I doubt I would now even though a lot has changed. I will probably move begrudgingly to Android sometime after Christmas when there are deals on phones about if my 950 can hold out for that long with a new battery.
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I went from an iPhone to a Lumia 920 then 1020, and loved them both. Too bad it didn't work out.
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It did poorly because they clung to the C# requirement for apps which made it incredibly impractical for cross platform development. Why spend a significant amount of effort for something on a platform with a tiny fraction of the market? So they got second rate knockoff apps which didn't give a compelling reason for people to move to that platform despite it being a better user experience (imo).
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I dunno. WP7 was basically DOA because the store sucked and had no comparable apps to the other ones. That basically killed the whole thing going forward. You'd hear about these sweet games and apps that people had on other phones and there'd be nothing for the WP.
There was a significant barrier to entry (completely separate codebases) for a tiny market segment. If users could get the same games and apps on the Windows Phone when it originally came out then there could have been a decent reason for them to give it a try.
Personally, I loved my Samsung Focus (WP7). It was fantastic. But the store couldn't compete so I ultimately abandoned the platform.-
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Are you sure? WP7 was C#-only, so coming from another platform, you really did have to rewrite absolutely everything, even any support libraries you used.
The reason it was C#-only was of course stupid wince :( it took a few more years before that was finally kicked out and they could allow native apps, and by then it was probably too late.
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True, but it had a chance. WP was growing in market share in a LOT in countries outside the US and UK. Mexico and a few other countries for a while had WP ahead of iOS. But then they decided to basically restart the App Store once, which was bad. Then they decided to essentially do it two more times. Oh, and if you bought some of the older hardware right before these major software releases, you were left to go fuck yourself because that phone won’t get the update, even if it was just released.
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Ah Windows Phone...the "me too" copycat that did way too little, way too late.
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That's the single biggest WTF for me - they made this phone whose UI was innovative, sure, but whose sales numbers were trounced by motherfucking BlackBerry, and they decided the best thing was to bring that UI to Windows and force everyone to use it.
Like I said I understand the argument for the innovative interface and the long haul strategy for the eventual Universal Windows Platform (wtf is that now, being able to run it on the Xbox?) but look at how many people don't want to upgrade from goddamn Windows 7.
Fun part is going to be all the articles unearthed showing how they figured Microsoft was going to own the whole thing since they'd have so much money to throw at it. -
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