I feel if Windows Mobile had just kept at it for ten years straight they would finally have had something - continually changing strategy killer any hope they had of being in a solid third place.
It seems that eventually, mobile app developers had enough of this farce and abandoned Windows Phone.
It's funny that you can still run 1980s visicalc.exe on Windows 10, and CMD.exe supports 1980s DOS command syntax, but for mobile apps they decided that apps should be rewritten from scratch every year.
I bought a cheap WP7 Nokia to develop on and the thing i remember most was that the UI was as smooth as Apple and not a stuttery one like Android of the same age.
Don't remember exactly why they left WP7 owners in the dust, but the biggest issue with it was that they fell for the Osbourne Effect and left quite a few mobile merchants pissed off about the amounts of WP7 devices left in stock that nobody wanted (and since those mobile merchants were often not the same as those with MS brand trust from the computer industry they felt no reason to give them a second chance).
While customers might've been a tad cautious, the biggest reason IMHO why WP8 died because few carriers,etc wanted to stock or sell them to begin with.
I would really like to learn why these breaks were considered necessary at the time. In a practical sense it's irrelevant since WP is dead. But on the other hand, with the huge mobile market at stake, why did MS make these decisions that doomed it, and that seem obviously wrong to outsiders?
To avoid repeating myself,
App support was lackluster though. It always felt like companies and developers had absolutely no intention to reimplement their applications on Windows Phone, even when it had a bigger market share than iPhone, especially in mid/low-income countries.
So I was stuck in 2015 with no authenticators, no mobile banking, no public transport apps. Even some of the biggest apps out there like Facebook where not releasing all of their products, e.g. there was no Snapchat and many other big names.
Windows Phone ultimately was killed by lack of third party applications and Microsoft imho should've kept burning money for 3/4 years more into the ecosystem bringing more applications on their mobile platform.
Android won the masses.
Nobody cares what poor people buy.
https://www.dignited.com/48795/why-do-ios-apps-generate-more...