Android Killed Windows Phone, Not Apple
theverge.com
theverge.com
When you've got little apps to start with obviously the best idea was to throw them all out twice and hope the developers are still interested. Not to mention the dev environment required Windows 8 - personally this is what discouraged me from even trying to develop on the platform, I wasn't going to give up my perfect Windows 7 installation for a toy OS that will allow me to create apps for a toy phone while getting in my way when I tried to do real work.
Add to that a shitty web browser and quite slow devices and obviously its failure must be the fault of the competition, I mean how can such a great product fail?
The only good thing I can remember about my Windows Phone is that it handled IMAP push notifications, something iOS is still lacking.
The incompatibility of apps was lame the first go around. I had bad luck with my devices and so I was out by the time of Windows 10. I didn't know the incompatibility happened a second time.
I don't think the browser or "slow devices" as you say are the reason for its demise at all though. Windows on mobile was a great OS.
I believe even with all the faults you mention, if they were somehow able to get the top 25 to 50 apps onto their store, we would still have Windows mobile around today with a ~10% market share worldwide (varying greatly by country).
Of course getting the apps onto their store would be an undertaking so it's quite hypothetical. My main point is, I firmly believe that is what killed Windows and any other OS that arrived late or never got popular enough by 2011 or so, when a few major apps were already desired by many people or at least the hype and talk would tell people that.
P.S. I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive.
Microsoft killed S60 (Symbian) and kept S40 for their lower phones, when S60 could have just become the base.
It used a C++ dialect called Symbian C++, basically Hungarian notation everywhere, special semantics how objects were created (Two-phase creation), strings could not be used directly, ARM trap errors instead of exceptions, and so on.
They also rebooted the SDK multiple times, initially Code Warrior based, then a set of Eclipse CDT plugins, then they rebooted it and created another Eclipse attempt called Caride.
They eventually added POSIX support (PIPS), but just nowadays with Android, due to lack of updates, not every device could take apps that made use of PIPS.
Then came Qt, but it was pretty much WIP by the time the burning platform memo came to be.
Also, it was a great OS for tinkerers because it wasn't hard to gain access to the OS files and play around with stuff, install sis and jar files, modify signatures (alright, that's a bit shady but I was ten, give me a break) and whatnot, but I imagine the lack of a central app store until much later did the platform no good either, because apps were slightly hard to find for a general user, and carriers (where I lived) often scammed users by offering free jar apps picked from the web on their portals for absurd amount of money.
Plus it had ask-on-use permissions built-in before the iPhone was even a thing.
There was also UIQ. Used by Sony Ericsson on their P series, and Motorola in various models.
Google actively fought MS on windows phone. It seems silly now that they'd see WP as a threat at all, but even 2-3 years ago they were sabotaging MSs attempts to build a youtube app. MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were. IIRC it was to do with displaying ads. At the time the official google apps did not do ads. MS had to revert to essentially a shortcut to YouTube in the browser.
Aside from that most of the big players were there, but when new trendy app would launch, it would launch on android and IOS. WP users would have to wait for a critical mass of popularity in the hope that there would be a port.
I wonder why they did that? Oh yeah, it's exactly like Microsoft not "giving" anything to the Linux desktop, ever.
Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts.
"ever" is a strong word.
Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.
VSCode is indeed part of their cloud strategy. I do not for a moment claim that they did anything benevolent for linux desktop experience -- nor do I expect them to do anything especially for Linux (on the contrary, I expect them to try to kill it).
And still, all I objected was to your use of the word "ever", since VSCode is actually packaged for the linux desktop, and is, IMHO, at the moment the best IDE on linux for quite a few languages.
There were many things Microsoft could do, but it seems they weren't fully committed to the platform.
TheVerge reported them paying up to $100,000 to companies to port their apps to the store.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...
That was back in 2013. Foursquare was one of those - MS covered the cost of porting it to WP. They even hired an outside developer team to do it.
It seems silly now partly because they fought it back then. Microsoft had their fare share of blunders, but they would have likely done better if Google did not act -- possibly much better.
> MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were.
That's not what happened. MS's app was always in violation of Google's terms of service, and google indeed blocked them -- but there was no "sudden" violation. MS was using the same API that Google was, except it wasn't a public one -- and MS did not display ads on that app, a condition that Google actively enforced on every 3rd party YT app.
Yes, Google's iOS and Android apps used Google's non-public API, and the iOS app at the time did not display ads (the android one did). So? I do not know what kind of agreement Apple and Google had in place at the time, not was one made public -- it is possible that Apple paid for the no-ad experience, and it is possible that Google forgo iOS ad revenue in return for access to iOS users. Whatever - Microsoft was in no position to demand favorable treatment with respect to YouTube, but they gave it to themselves anyway (and suffered Google's hand as a result). Google never was under an obligation to give all 3rd parties the same API they use themselves.
One should also note that the website version of YouTube was perfectly serviceable on iPhones and Androids at the time, but was horrible on Windows Phone because the MS browser was not implementing neither standards or de-facto standards at the time; if MS invested in a reasonable moble browser (or allowed 3rd party ones), their users would likely have had a reasonable YouTube experience.
Another thing that happened more or less at the same time, which I am sure is intimately related: Microsoft asserted patents to make Google pay to make Exchange protocol available on gmail accounts, and threatening Android manufacturers left and right on infringements. Then, more or less a week after Windows Phone came out, an capitalized on the Exchange protocol (everything else wasn't as well implemented or executed -- but who cares, Gmail, Exchange and outlook supported it), Google announced that "due to Microsoft's licensing fees, users of the free tier of Gmail will no longer get Exchange protocol on a new device" -- meaning that no Windows Phone user could get a proper gmail experience on their phone. Microsoft immediately replied with "no no no, please, have it free for all users", but Google did not change their stance.
Microsoft made the bed, completely on their own.
As opposed to Apple requiring you to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? I doubt that having to install Windows 8 - especially since you could use a VM - was a large deterrent to a lot of people.
The first wave of ios apps came from Mac developers; then people started buying macs to build ios apps. The first wave of WP apps didn't come .... because there were very few people who could build an app on their existing dev environment (win8 uptake among developers was abysmal).
Furthermore, the first ios wave actually came from the homebrew scene, which organically grew and produced ios apps even before Apple provided an SDK; There was never such enthusiasm for MS to build on. The WP8 requirement was just adding insult to injury.
My first smartphone was a Palm Pre. I then switched to some of the first kind-of-mature android phones, like the HTC Desire and the Galaxy S2.
I remember feeling like I had taken a huge leap forward in hardware, but a backwards leap in software.
Even today I miss some things of WebOS. WebOS nailed the experience of having two documents of the same app. Each "card" could be a document, or a view into something, and each app could have several of those.
A short while ago I tried to write an email for which I needed to look often at another previous email. This is trivial on any desktop, but was a mayor pain on the mobile device I tried it (can't remember if Android tablet or iPad, but I doubt it's very different).
(If I recall correctly, Android today allows apps to expose several "Cards", or several views at the same time in the task switcher, but no apps do. For a while Chrome had an option to treat every tab as an independent card, which I liked but was messy for many people...
Every time I use a mobile device for anything serious, I think "This would be so much more comfortable and natural on Mac/Windows/Linux" every 5 minutes. May be it's just I'm antiquated.)
Dear god. As someone who just had to battle Win8 on a corporate laptop from a vendor... I'm shocked WP did as well as it did if this is true.
It was really sad to see the established players freak out like that.
The plugins never materialized. Every third party wanted complete control over it's app, which later developed into stores for digital goods, wallets, etc.
The situation was not helped by the fact, that there was no such system on iOS and the only way for a messenger to wait for messages on the background were push notifications from Apple servers. Here people expected separate apps for separate chat networks.
So basically what we have today is exactly what the market wanted.
If "the market" means "companies" then yes. "Users", not so much.
Much like Apple getting rid of Flash, if MS had a dominant market position they could have forced a user-friendly trend. Alas.
When it was pointed to them, what they could have ("all the instant messaging in a single app"), the answer was a blank stare and a reply, why would they want that, they are perfectly fine launching separate apps.
I especially remember FB messages taking hours to arrive sometimes...at its fastest there would be a delay of several minutes. So much for "instant messaging". At least back then you could still access messages in the browser.
Blackberry also implemented the Hubs feature in its BB10 and Android devices, but again functionality is pretty limited, by design. IM is a big business, and the companies behind it aren't interested in your using them outside of their own app, as you'd be deprived of using "innovations" like Stories, GIF addons and emoji packs.
Facebook and Twitter want you using their apps, so they aren't incentivized to play nicely with a concept like Hubs. Towards the end of Windows Phone 8.1 they opened it up to the apps themselves to implement Hub support, rather than Microsoft's team having to keep up to date with the API, but then again Facebook and Twitter don't have any incentive to support the Hubs that well (or even at all) when they really want your eyeballs directly in their own app.
The true death of the Hubs, though was the teams in question being handed over to the Skype brand and new features that would have gone to the hubs going instead to Skype-branded apps. It makes sense for Microsoft to attach a real brand to it, especially if they are making a play to bring more of those features cross-platform (which it sounds like is the goal: the Timeline stuff that's been announced is a differently organized, more app-centric approach to some of the Hubs; the People Hub is now on the Windows 10 taskbar, with deeper Skype integration; etc).
It's sad to see some defining features of Windows Phone 8 get broken up and parceled out into different apps, and there's definitely a question that if those things become way more cross-platform (including iOS and Android support) what becomes of Windows mobile, what is left for its unique and/or flagship features? (Other than maybe being a full Windows PC given the x86 on ARM rumors?)
Never had any problems with WP browser. I really liked that address bar was at the bottom, and the quirks didn't bother me that much.
When Windows Phone 7 and 8 came out, other than Android what other alternatives existed for OEMs to use as an OS to compete head to head with the iPhone? There was only Android. Without Android, in 2010 and 2012 they'd have had no choice but to form a queue and sign licensing agreements with Microsoft for 7 and 8.
Even if the Pre had succeeded, that wouldn't fundamentally have changed anything because it wasn't a licensed OS, aside from the persistent hardware and software quality issues that held it back. Microsoft would still have been the only viable option for companies like Samsung, Sony, HTC, etc and Windows Phone 7 and 8 were fine platforms. They could absolutely have competed with the iPhone just as successfully as Android did. They were just too late because Android was already out there and already had the apps.
lol, but it did exist. TBH, when MS started their phone efforts, I think even Symbian was still around, and other operators had their own pet projects here and there - which is what the status quo was like before the iPhone anyway. So MS knew very well from the start that they had to be better than existing competition, they couldn't just stroll in and hoover up the market.
WP was a pretty bad MS fumble. They had the brand and the market clout to nail it, and they lost it to a competitor that all but followed their original Windows blueprint: give the OS more or less away (with Windows, through tolerated piracy; with Android, through opensource licensing) to get de-facto monopoly, and then leverage it in more lucrative areas (for Windows, Office and enterprise software; for Android, Google's own services and datamining).
This gave them the sense of ownership of the devices. It was theirs and the device did whatever they wanted. If you didn't want anything to do with Google - you could.
iOS was walled garden. Microsoft also tried to make WP into walled garden, controlling, what's running on the device and getting their cut.
It changed during 2.2/2.3 era, when it became mainstream. With 4.0, even the hardcore early adopters didn't bother anymore. At that age, the OS was already well established.
Back when 1.x shipped, all internal storage (emmc?) was dedicated to the firmware/os and apps.
user data like images and music were expected to be stored on an SD card.
But later OEMs started partitioning the emmc in two, with the smaller partition housing the firmware and apps, and the larger being mounted as if it was an SD card.
Come 2.x this got official blessing, with the introduction of "move to SD" (more like "copy some static data to SD").
But people found this to be constrained, so they would root and use tools like LinkToSD to basically set up a EXT partition on an SD card and move whole apps there, using symlinks or something to make them appear to still be in the firmware partition.
Come 4.x the user data partition was replaced with a union mount. Thus writes to /sdcard ended up somewhere else in the FS. Later versions piggybacked on this to provide support for multiple users.
Note that 4.x was also the intro of MTP for wired data transfers. This because earlier the "SD card" had to be unmounted from Android to allow a PC to access it over USB.
And now we have the Storage Access Framework, that piggyback on the plumbing introduced with MTP to offer apps limited RW access to storage areas without the need for certain permissions.
Microsoft has learned nothing from the failure of Windows Phone, and is now in the process of killing Windows. Yes, Windows 10 is pretty good, but as an app platform it is a failure. Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. And why would any developer make native Windows apps? Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. (Yes, Electron is bloated but if your application is substantial this is not a deal breaker.)
Had UWP run on windows 7 we might have seen some more take-up.
These days it's getting even easier with Xamarin adding support for WPF, but even without that sort of hand-holding there have always been options.
XAML/WPF is much better than "no backwards compatibility" if you needed to support a UWP-first application on Windows 7. Certainly there were more issues moving the other direction, but particularly/mostly if you had skipped architecting for Silverlight as an intermediate step.
Seconded. The previous times I wanted/needed to do Windows development, the first step was ridiculously simple:
BUY book
FROM bookstore
WHERE author = 'Charles Petzold'
AND title CONTAINS 'Programming Windows'
ORDER BY publication_date DESC
LIMIT 1
Nowadays, that gives "Programming Windows Sixth Edition", from 2013, which "focuses exclusively on writing Windows Store applications", for Windows 8, almost always in XAML and C#. He says that "Plenty of other books already exist for writing Win32 desktop applications, including the 5th edition of Programming Windows. I’ll occasionally make reference to Win32 API and desktop applications, but this book is really all about writing new Windows 8 applications".
If I use this book, will it work for Windows 10 also? Are these applications only distributable via the Windows Store or can I host them for download from anywhere? If I want to distribute an application through the Windows Store does it have to be this type, or can I also distribute Win32 desktop applications via the store?
I have one specific application I miss from my old 3rd generation iPad that I have not found a good equivalent for on my Surface Pro 4, and so would like to write it myself, but I have not found a clear explanation of just what my options are, so have not started.
Microsoft made $21bn on $90bn in revenues [1] and the stock market responded by sending the stock to an all-time high of ~$74 [2].
Microsoft is still a very healthy business and will remain so for a while.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time...
I agree though that app stores for desktop apps, seems to be the case for OS X as well. Not quiet sure why.
For the same customers that require WPF/Windows Forms nowadays, and there are tons of them in industrial settings.
Their Windows XP and Windows 7 computers won't last forever, but they still need to plug hardware devices, OS specific APIs, and COM based drivers into their native apps.
You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runaway success, and an electron app. The reason they don't build these as UWP apps is because they are cross-platform. UWP is currently only available on Windows, and they want VSCode etc to run on MacOS and Linux.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future. It makes perfect sense (apart from the name, but MS is no stranger to renaming things)
> Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps.
I'm really not sure what you mean here. Metro is bland and flat if you design your app that way, and a lot of people design electron apps specifically "flat" to avoid them looking like a particular OS. android and ios apps look like this, I think its just a natural trend of the software / UI industry that apps are starting to look homogenous.
I personally don't like it though. I like file menus like old school forms apps. If that's what you mean then I agree.
> So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron.
Not for design reasons!
Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub).
So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack.
I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent".
(There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)
Thanks to Elop and Microsoft we never see that happening. It was killed before it was even born.
I bought the Nokia N9(the only Meego phone released) a couple of month after its launch, knowing the OS is coming to its end. The Meego OS was a very polished and well-made OS. It was smooth, very intuitive, and simply the best touchscreen smartphone experience I've ever had. Thats was why Elop and WP infuriate me so much. It was a missed opportunity. Nokia took the easy route of getting paid by Microsoft to use its OS, and that bite them in the ass.
And so I'm glad that trash WP and Nokia failed spectacularly
The 770 to N810 issue was hardware performance, not platform breakage. The 770 was simply too damn hardware constrained compared to the N800/810 (basically a N800 with a keyboard, and just a single SD slot).
The N900 on the other hand introduced a whole new UI, QT as the primary UI framework, and beefed up the hardware on top.
Yes you could still attempt to run N900 programs on the N800, but they would rarely fit the screen etc.
- Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007)
- Windows Phone 7 was great, but it was too late by then (2010... 3 years after iPhone was release and 2 years after first Android phone)
- There were two resets (7 => 8, 8 => 10) which screwed customers hard. With the 7 => 8 upgrade, not only were apps incompatible, the OS was incompatible with previous hardware.
- The App Store was mostly full of garbage apps (lots of fake apps- hard to fine the genuine app)
- Carriers didn't do a very good job pushing Windows Phone (can you blame them? :P )
From my perspective (former WP user, 2011 - 2015), the biggest WTF to me was when Microsoft bought Nokia. That seems to be about the time they just completely gave up
This was perhaps the big one. The CE/PocketPC lineage had been going since the 90s, but Phone 7 was a sharp break with that.
Thus existing users knew they were hosed, and so no longer had a reason to be loyal to MS.
It is weird seeing MS forgo their biggest trump card in this way. Their continued grip on a market has been thanks to backwards compatibility. Yet they squandered that on mobile, and seems poised to squander it on desktop as well.
Are you taking about US market? I don't think they ever exceeded 15% globally.
Heh, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Just got done watching a bunch of 8-bit Guy videos on the topic.
I also strongly agree. Two reboots was ridiculous in the time period that the phone was relevant.
Though a lot of that was still momentum/inertia, too. Microsoft had always charged for Windows on every platform, that business model was largely sound and safe.
In Windows 10 there was enough push to change that business model, but the hesitancy in the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 timeframes to do that probably did lead a lot of handset manufacturers to "free" Android SKUs.
I believe Microsoft still has a chance but they need to 1) talk to samsung and other big android/smartphone manufacturers 2) make a killer feature
"talk to Samsung"? Samsung dominate android phone sales. They are single handedly winning the phone wars against iphone. Why would they now support a potential challenge to that?
But they have made all the right moves over the past five years, and have lots of momentum, cash, and goodwill from the tech community. They will do some sort of big mobile push in the near future. Probably some kind of Surface Phone, which can double as a desktop.
A surface phone would leverage the surface brand, retain compatibility from wp10 (and wp8/8.1 despite what some seem to believe), and be able to run a full Desktop OS via continuum, the killer feature that never killed.
Windows 10 S is a clear attempt to push UWP going forward. I think this is with a view to future arm devices. It really seems like winRT again from the other direction. Right now you can upgrade 10S to run full Desktop apps but on future devices (ARM) who knows?
There's also talk of x86 emulation on ARM now that Intel has given up on mobile.
So too with x86 on ARM emulation there's a bridge for that gap that "ARM Windows is not real Windows" now.
I expect Microsoft will continue to make plays in the space for Windows 10 on mobile/pocket PCs, especially when the timing is right (the right hardware combo, perhaps; or more of the mobile-intended "Redstone" features finish out, maybe).
Also, I don't fully buy the argument that Windows Phone was unsuccessful because it was late. I think that doesn't matter that much - changing phones and even phone operating system isn't such a big deal. After using iOS for about 8 years, I have no problem to switch to something else, if it proves to be better, or equal but cheaper. If Windows Phone would be better back then, more people would switch to it after their next phone upgrade.
IOS and android are the future, but WP is vinyl
The paid-for hype was obvious and hollow. Commentators sprung up in tech-related forums everywhere, singing the praises of the development experience of WP 7 with personal testimony of how awesome it was, months before it was available to developers. Then scarcely a year later, when it was clear that WP7 was not setting the world on fire, exactly the same obvious, transparent marketing hype started being produced for WP8. When challenged about this, it was declaimed that WP7 had only ever been meant as a transition phase, and 8 was where it was really the future!
It was so blatant, and so pointless.
We wouldn't have that default "install me" tile for Candy Crush Saga in Windows 10 if it weren't for Islandwood. :P
I did try out the windows phone emulation though, and was pretty impressed wrt speed. Video and camera wasn't working yet, but they had an intelligent strategy to stub and reimpment play services and billing.
Amusingly, I had to buy a $50 wp on ebay, because the one microsoft gave me when they flew a bunch of mobile devs to redmond to ask what tools we wanted, the one they gave us was not one of the two models that supported the beta. I'm only salty because, like wp itself, it was never officially killed, and we just had to figure it out when the program stopped updating.
We would get paid for having our app on store. Seems the person who reached was a middle man and was more interested in making money for himself than getting good apps built.
I knew there was no way they could recover from that situation.
By the time Windows entered the Market, Android and iOS had the critical mass of developers and users in downloading games and apps from their respective apps stores and Windows could not break into the network effect.
They could have built an OS that was light-years ahead of iOS and Android and it still wouldn't have mattered because no apps, no sale.
Their hail mary was impressive and ahead of it's time, but there was no room for a #3 in the market with Google giving away everything for free.