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Comment by dashundchen | Hacker News Reader

Moving to the closed app store ecosystem, and breaking app compatibility twice with the move from 6 -> 7 -> 8 definitely killed all developer momentum for their platform.

But the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet. It's a shame it was killed with the Windows 8 blunder.

The Nokia Lumia phones had some amazing hardware for the era too. Head to head with Apple and leagues better than the chintzy Android phones of the era.

Neither Apple nor Google have come close to replicating something as intuitive.

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>the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet.

In the face of no cut/copy/paste, no multitasking, no sdcard support and only MS store apps allowed - you could have made do with wallpaper of the Phone7 GUI for all the functionality you got out of it.

Zune on the other hand was absolutely as good as you say. Maybe the mistake was trying to make that perfect Zune OS work on a smartphone.

Not twice, then there was the 8 -> 8.1 -> 10 -> back to Win32.

The incredible part is how on the developer community sessions on YouTube or Github issues, they talk about rewriting as if that wasn't a big development cost.

Naturally the Windows developer community that invested into the Win32 => WinRT evolution, no longer wants to hear about WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, unless they have a sunken cost into products that they somehow still want to sell and depend on WinRT related technologies to avoid closing shop.

WinRT was my favourite development stack from all mobile platforms. And XNA/Silverlight before it.

I really was happy with my Nokia 1020 and Dell Venue phones. I ended up going back to Android after the death of Windows Phone till I got frustrated with the lack of support of even former flagship devices and switched to Apple. I've gotten used to Apple, but I really still miss how intuitive and customizable Windows Phone was.

My son had a Nokia Phone8 in high school and loved the thing to death. Doubly so because he had the only one around. He couldn't do a lot with it but he really enjoyed the UI.

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