It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.
Windows has never had great dynamic scaling, so trying to run regular apps on a phone would be a nightmare of tiny click targets. Metro apps would scale better, but that was the whole point of UWP.
IMO they've given up slightly too early. They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer, or various other things, but Microsoft just can't handle a market where they aren't dominant. The only way they could leverage their dominance would be to break Exchange ActiveSync and say "if you want your calendar on your phone, it has to be a Windows phone".
And Intel have pulled back from the low-power area (mobiles, Edison) because they're not competitive there. Maybe the same "can't function when not market leader" problem.
MS had Android emulation[0] in the works for Windows Mobile 10 but then decided to cancel it citing it was "unnecessary".
[0]https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
This was one of the big mistakes made by OS/2 when they were competing against Windows. They created a compatibility layer for Windows applications, which meant that developers never wrote native apps for their platform, leading to a very poor user experience and gave Windows a leg-up on its competition. I doubt Microsoft wants to make the same mistake.
Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything?
I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don't think they can compete.
Windows is way ahead in both security and power efficiency.
About security, here’s an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410833 In Windows, clipboard access was restricted to foreground app since WP7.
About power efficiency, WP is very restrictive on what apps can do in background. See this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh2029...
The fact that a viable mobile OS has to be restrictive about background operations is exactly what I was talking about when I said they can't fix it without breaking everything.
Nonsense
https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an...
https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...
I mean that capability is where the desktop version of windows keeps getting more features matching; each version of Phone and Desktop have been more and more like each-other.