Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

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Lacking 3rd party apps was more of a symptom than a root cause in my opinion.

Instead of being scrappy and trying to do whatever it took to gain marketshare in an area they were behind in they put a ton of limitations on their platform and it tanked adoption because the people who were willing to switch and try something new were by definition people who were going to be frustrated with this behavior.

Things like not supporting multitasking or apps running in the background, blocking all exes from even being downloaded, not giving access to the underlaying file system, categorically blocking applications like video game emulators, restricting the ability to tether your phone, etc.

Yes there wasn't third-party app support and yes their maps sucked but I think both of those would have been fixed over time if they didn't take a super arrogant big brother approach to the operating system.

Example of what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/JfFiuO4.png

Microsoft both directly and indirectly turned app developers away from Windows Phone.

Mobile games at the time were all OpenGL ES, which Microsoft refused to support in favor of Direct3D.

Then there was Microsoft's perpetual need to start over. WM6.5 to WP7 broke app compatibility. WP7 to WP8, entirely new APIs. WP8 to WM10 there was UWP and Continuum, again forcing major rewrites if you wanted the new features.

And finally how Microsoft treated the devs themselves. Ad-supported apps depended on Microsoft's ad network which was artificially kept alive by Microsoft injecting money for Xbox and Office ads. Once Microsoft stopped, the whole thing folded, leaving developers with a sudden loss of income.

Developers from countries in Microsoft's 2nd tier additionally reported poor treatment and Kafka'esque bureaucracy preventing them from publishing apps: https://toshl.com/blog/why-publishing-on-the-windows-phone-m...

This is why I think the app situation would not have fixed itself over time, and MS efforts to ease transition like Project Islandwood were doomed from the start, because those fixed a problem but not the problem.

There was no lack of games, Valve even needs to emulate DirectX and Win32, as Android developers couldn't care less about Steam Deck.

The rewrites across multiple versions, that is what killed the desire to target the devices.

There were numerous comments from game developers, including from folks here on HN, that the lack of OpenGL ES was a major obstacle for porting games to Windows Phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434891

I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.

One random dude on HN isn't numerous comments from game developers.

The effort to port between Windows and Windows Phone was way less than between Windows and XBox.

The comment which I linked was just an illustration. And I was talking about porting mobile games from iOS/Android to Windows Phone.

Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).

An illustration without market relevance.

It was still DirectX and Win32 for the most part.

Only FOSS indie devs make such an uproar of OpenGL and friends.

Walk around GDC, PAX, GDCE to see how much professional game developers care.

What does the Steam Deck have to do with an ARM phone running a shitty locked-down version of "Windows" with a lobotomized DirectX that has half the features? You can whine all you want about OpenGL/Metal/Vulkan but it doesn't change the fact that Windows Phone failed where Android and iOS succeeded.

To me it was also crazy how basically being the third player to the table for the modern smartphone, they pretended to already be in Apple's position. Like you said, lack of third party apps killed it. On a whim I wanted to dabble in WP dev a bit in I think late 2014, and just to launch the dev environment I needed to have a dev account which was still paid at that point iirc. I guess that's how you get more people to port their apps over to a platform that has no market share.

And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out!

Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.

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