Around the official death of Windows Mobile, most of us just wanted them to launch hardware that wasn't a joke.
That's the problem with anecdotes... they only represent your very narrow window of experience while ignoring literally every other person on the planet.
> but I don't know a single person that wanted a Windows phone
I only represent a single person, and I make no claims about anyone else!
...no apps. Windows Mobile just couldn't attract quality developers to its platform. After witnessing that - I fully understood why Android went with Java (the language): there was already a deep pool of seasoned Java developers.
For instance, Apple forced people to write iPhone apps in Objective-C for years and nobody avoided the platform because of that, even buying Macs and paying 99 dollars a year for the privilege of writing and selling iOS apps.
>That's the problem with anecdotes
I'm not saying those problems affected Windows phone, but that's the association customers have with Windows as a brand due to decades of facing those problems with desktop Windows.
I like not having apps pester me for updates or pollute my notifications, when all I care about is email, websites and phonecalls (oh and offline maps, I almost forgot)
I guess I am a very boring person!
The discipline also extended to heavy sandboxing of the apps so a lot of functionality was simply unimplemetable, such as reminders for missed notifications.
But the phone worked, the UI was intiutive and responsive, and the only reason to move on, other than general phone obsolescence like the 5MP camera, was the lack of mainstream apps.
We had a brief experience with WP10 on another phone, and it seemed spiffier but less stable. WP8 was the high point.
I appreciated the consistency in design and that even the cheap devices like the 635 felt quite snappy. They also seemed a bit more coherent with update support. Yes, the no WP7->8 update path was a huge mistake, but I think by the end they were updating the OS for all WP devices (capable of being updated) centrally, rather than relying on the OEMs; the WP10 update betas I tried seemed competent enough but there was a growing sense their heart wasn't in it.
With each new generation of Windows Phone, Microsoft not only closes the gap with iOS and Android in important ways, but it also differentiates in important ways
WINDOWS PHONE 8 REVIEW
https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3570494/windows-phone-8-...
On its heyday (approaching 10% in Europe), Windows Phones were seen as the alternative for those that wanted an Android alternative and didn't care about iPhone.
This is Android based on my eight years with them.
I won't argue with you on iPhone, it's a great "I just want it to work" option. And since there's no other alternative, it's what I carry today.
But Windows Mobile was a breath of competency in a market of basically all bad Google phones.
The first modern Windows Mobile phone launched in November 2015. The market of Google phones at that point in time was the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6.
Now I'm not a huge fan of the Nexus 6 (though I certainly wouldn't call it "bad"), but the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are still to this date the best value smartphones ever released.
Everything else outside of the Chinese market has Google Play Services with root access to the system and as controlled by Google's MADA agreement with manufacturers which has already been found illegal in multiple jurisdictions across the globe.
Convention dictates that "Google phones" specifically means e.g., Nexus/Pixel devices.
Fortunately, if you're unwilling to distinguish between hardware and software, there's already a very convenient and unambiguous term for mobile devices that run Google's OS. In fact, you just used it in the same sentence!