So, to summarize, on par with iOS design’s decision from day one, right?
The sales figures disagree.
In this case, the lateness of the product, the continual burning of their phone platforms, anticompetitive behavior of Google and some of its associated companies, carrier disinterest, and a lackluster marketing campaign are among the reasons it failed.
I doubt you will find many people who tried or used the phone who didn’t like it.
You can still see this in most reviews, too - reviews of Windows 8/8.1 are generally pretty negative, while reviews of WP 8/8.1 on the same site are positive to glowing.
Windows Mobile 10/Windows 10 are the only ones that are nominally the same and still are in fact very different.
Again, if you talked to people that actually picked up and tried (or bought) a Windows Phone, they were almost universally very pleased with the phone UI and OS. The single biggest complaint you will see is about the app selection.
And please don't be condescendingly academic about WP/W8 distinction. The "ugliness" of UI people here talk about is present on both platforms and you still have to do some work to hide it on W10 (e.g. manually unpinning tiles from start menu after each upgrade, confusing system settings, disjoint set of options in old vs new UI etc.).
> And please don't be condescendingly academic about WP/W8 distinction. The "ugliness" of UI people here talk about is present on both platforms
I googled "Windows Phone 8 review". This is typical of the results I get.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/windows-phone-8-review/
Windows Phone 8 makes significant changes while remaining true to its core. It's sharp, colorful, clean, and simple, but also hip and a bit exuberant. New features include a surge of NFC actions, greater customization, and a heavy peppering of more-minor additions and adjustments; yet it's the tile-based interface that continues to be the operating system's most distinctive and defining characteristic.
The UI is virtually always called out as great and great looking, even if the reviewer ends up not liking the rest of the package.
I felt like the tiles displayed the right level of information where I could quickly glance at my phone and see if there was anything important that needed my attention, while helping to reduce the mindless time I spent getting distracted by noise.
When I was using my Windows Phone it felt like the UI was built to decrease interaction with the device, which was a positive to me. It was trying to get the right information in front of me so I could get back to being detached from the screen.
But that is a sample size of 1.
The other thing that killed them, as many have noted, was the lack of apps. That's because they were too late mainly; they were a me-too after iPhone and Android had already established their dominance. What app developer wants to spend a lot of time and resources developing a 3rd version of their app for a new platform that no one is using yet?
It did alright in Europe but overall, the Windows Phone campaign was inexcusably mismanaged to such a degree that it seemed deliberate. It felt abandoned almost from day one. It was unlikely you'd see one anywhere, in any store, because it'd been relegated to retail backwaters like the Microsoft Store.
It was frustrating to watch. Essentially the whole Zune thing on replay. Microsoft does not do a good job of presenting a united force to get a product in front of the eyes of consumers or generating any sort of hype.
And then they ran Nokia through a corporate shredder, just in case you were worried that Windows Phone might have a future.
From what I remember in the US, the phone stores just weren't interested in pushing them too much, for various reasons. That's not MS's fault.
Maybe you didn't think they were ugly, but a lot of people did. Aesthetics have never been MS's strong suit, nor has naming (their names are always horribly boring and unimaginative, unless they buy it, e.g. PowerPoint or Excel).
MS also had a bad reputation because everyone knew they made the OS on their home and/or work computer that crashed all the time. XP will still in use at that time, remember, and 95/98/Me weren't that far in the past at that point.
MS also has a bad history of abandoning their products. You mentioned Zune; right before that, they had "PlaysForSure", which didn't "play for sure" because they abandoned it and all those customers were screwed. On Windows Phone, people who bought the earlier versions were screwed because they were incompatible with the later versions. (IIRC, this was a big problem because the apps were incompatible between the versions, and this made the app store problem even worse.)
Sure, there was a lack of apps; but it wasn't all because it was too late; Windows phone 7 wasn't _that_ late to the game, and there's value being the only app for X on a platform, even if it's the smallest platform. The problem was your windows 7 app didn't work right on 8, and you probably should rewrite it again for 8.1, and you definitely need to rewrite it for 'Universal' Windows Platform for 10, except that's a waste of time since 10 never got anywhere close to the number of users as 8.
If Microsoft hadn't effectively killed Windows Mobile 10 by merging the desktop and mobile teams during development, and ended up with a solid Windows Mobile 10 release at launch, they would have been able to continue as a third platform. Supporting WP 8 devices upgrading to 10 and continuing to release lower end devices on 10 would have helped get existing developers to update their apps for 10. Having a decent browser would have helped, but Microsoft was playing the 'pretend to be iOS' game too hard, and blocked browsers from the store until it was too late; Firefox wanted to release for WP, but Microsoft said no, and IE/Edge are IE/Edge.
Given all of the things Google is doing to try to rein in apps, like Doze and this storage api revocation; it would be nice to have an option that isn't iOS.
WP 8 may have been ugly, but it was functional, and had a dark mode _everywhere_. The better tiles were really useful for getting the right amount of information, and because they were a critical part of the UI design, most apps supported them, unlike launcher widgets which are pretty hit or miss. Number badges require you to go in and reset the count to zero or they don't provide a useful signal; seeing the last message lets you delay it to later.
Apps were part of what killed Windows Phone, but I also think they released their OS with too little built-in features. My brother used to own a phone with early Windows version; it lacked a lot of small conveniences and tweakables that were available on contemporary Android phones. I vaguely recall sharing media with other devices was a problem; not unlike how it's with iPhones.
https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/Windows-Phone-Ap...
If they had that from the day one, it could have ended up with a lot less resistance (just the ugliness of the default palette was unbearable; they must have hired an expert for achieving the most negative impression with those original tiles/colors).
And until end of this year they will sum up more updates than most of Android devices combined, and VS offers a much saner development environment.
What the vast majority of people also don't want to do is spend time and effort dealing with malware. Hence the success of locked down systems.
In frustration and at 25% or less of the actual capability, because of stupid design choices that destroy interoperability. This is mostly a consequence of an app market of selfish independent actors, but at least the operating system could encourage more interop, instead of trying to destroy it.
Make something that will run the same apps, on the same hardware, but put the user in control of the thing. Then add all the interesting features you wanted to put in your independent system.
Which is easier in this case because it's possible to fork Android and start from there. The major problem seems to be the driver issue on mobile. The drivers are blobs tied to a specific kernel, which makes it hard for people to try out the new thing on their existing phone, which suppresses adoption and participation. And that's also the thing that prevents you from even upgrading your old phone to a newer version of vanilla Android.
So it seems like what we badly need is a solution for that.
The content jails in iOS made the device into a media consumption toy, rather than anything productive.
It is just that now there is a lot more control to insure that the user is aware of it, and some new technical limitations.
Its disruptive, but not nearly as limited as iOS.
And we've seen that apps that are trustworthy can be bought and sold, sometimes by companies that are very untrustworthy.
When I used Android, I just didn’t install things unless I really, really wanted them, and they were popular enough that I figured security researchers would likely be looking at them closely. (Which, of course, was a great incentive to keep using Google’s ecosystem for everything.)
I tried iOS a few years ago, and one of the big differences is that I’m a lot more confident about trying random apps; I know there’ll still be shady apps, but Apple’s vetting and the iOS security model give me a lot more confidence. I’ve installed (and paid for) a lot more apps as a result; my phone’s much more usable to me.
Somehow we're not discussing prohibiting filesystem access for personal computers? Why is this an issue for smartphones, a.k.a. a pocket-sized personal computer?
If Windows had proper filesystem sandboxing enforced on applications, ransomware would disappear overnight