Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had really terrible performance.
They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app compatibility for the next release.
2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8 and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework rewrite to cope with.
The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen.
When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back then.
It was that a pseudo-machine/VM approach put the VM IP owner (Adobe, Sun/Oracle) in driver's seat for control of the product's precious HW resources while letting their affiliates define the UI. What could go wrong, knowing that to invite in the vampire of their bloat & risk was to give those IP owners a competitive leg up to override all your design choices and serve their own markets, contrary to everything Jobs had done to rescue Apple from its clone wars.
Oh, and that Flash and Java were the world's most popular malware/APT delivery vehicles at that that continued to wreck PCs for many years after 2007.
But it wasn't about performance!
Or why Jobs choose to not drive a stake into his own heart to defend from vampires.
It would be interesting to see a companion presentation from the POV of Cingular/ATT. They likely also were very surprised and entertained by Jobs' device!
I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos online...
The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.
I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.
I think it got to be so common that firefox supported reloading the library without restarting the browser if you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins" page.
And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions...
Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
Apparently the whole Windows UI mess is also related to Microsoft not able to hire new folks with Windows development experience, probably they only saw Win32 after joining Microsoft, funny how things come around.
It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser.
I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS updates.
We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.
Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.
Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?
And he was proven correct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
But back to wallpapers - while the jail breaking community didn’t care, between performance (lot easier to redraw a black background), memory and battery life, background images would have adverse affects on the iPhone. it wasn’t that it couldn’t be done.
This is the sentence in your original comment I had responded to (and I quoted it in my original comment, not sure where's the misunderstanding here). iPhone was resource-constrained, but not that resource-constrained.
I do agree with your characterization of Flash being slow and clunky at the time for the most part, hence prefacing my comment as "nit," although I do not for one second believe that's the primary reason Jobs killed it. If he wanted a fast Flash, he would have made Adobe dance to his standards.
> Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.
How was Jobs going to force Adobe to get Flash to run on a first gen iPhone when they could barely get it to run 4 years later on phones with 8x the memory and 2.5x faster?
Apple struggled to get Safari to run.
As another counterpoint. Google and Motorola tried to release an “iPad Killer” with the Motorola Xoom promising it would have 4g and Flash. Adobe was late releasing Flash for Android tablets leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t visit the Xoom product page from the Xoom itself because it required Flash.
Adobe Flash on mobile was always a clusterfuck
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgOX9mb7V4o
PS: In reality the stuttering masses were probably using a respectable device that actually provided long term value (and probably had longer OS support than the Xoom haha).
Nokia could have succeeded in the smartphone market. They had the 770 since late 2005. But they were a typical corporation, conservative and plagued by internal politics. Bringing Elop on board, with his Windows agenda, didn't help either.
But Microsoft was too greedy with their licensing schemes and demanding too much adaptation from the hardware and chip manufacturers. You’d think they would adapt their OS and drivers, but no, you had to tape out new silicon for them. So they’ve lost the mobile OS market.
It feels like something like this may happen with the AI OS now. They are pushing hardware manufacturers to conform to their standards while Linux is adapting to what is available and working already.
Besides, WinCE PDAs were very much a power user / enthusiast device, with relatively few around. People who used them and thus were familiar with the old UI would be well aware that WP7 was completely different, and people that didn't use them weren't exposed to the old UI in the first place.
There are dozens of us !
I miss so many things besides the UI. seamless integration of Cortana with in-car bluetooth to read incoming SMS, live tiles, fantastic cameras in Nokia devices.
Amusingly Microsoft is still trying to make the walled garden happen. Lots of cheap Windows laptops and Desktops ship in what is called "Windows S" mode where only Microsoft Store apps are allowed to run. But again because PC owners don't abide that kind of bullcrap they also have to supply a way to tear down the walls (it's surprisingly easy, albeit permanent: just download and run a free app from the Windows store) if you want to use the machine in a normal way.
At each step they left the majority of devices behind.
What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.
Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in the span of a few years.
Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.
Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework, which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the public API remained .NET).
And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was effectively further evolution of Silverlight in terms of how it looked to app devs.
WP7 was a really low point for the series because not only the new app dev story was completely and utterly incompatible with anything done before, it also had a very limited feature set in terms of what you could actually do inside the app - much worse than the iOS sandbox.
WP7 -> WinRT transition was easier because WinRT was so similar to Silverlight in terms of APIs (in some simple cases you literally just had to change the using-namespace declaration to compile). It also added enough functionality for more interesting apps to be viable. But by then, the reputation hit from both devs (who were being told to again rewrite everything they already rewrote for WP7) and users (who were being told again that their devices won't get the new OS, and the new apps are incompatible with the old OS) was too much for the platform, IMO.
And then on top of all that Google actively sabotaged it by refusing to make apps for its popular services - such as YouTube - and actively pursuing third-party apps that tried to fill that gap.
After WinRT transition, Microsoft sabotaged themselves, due to the way WP 8 => WP 8.1 => WP 10 happened to be, with rewrites, promised upgrades that didn't happen, deprecation of C++/CX, and plenty of other missteps.
Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
Both look and feel awesome, not cheap at all. At the time, Microsoft were paying developers to port apps to Windows Phone. There were developers who took the effort to make their app look native, and I'd say Windows Phone 7 had the best UX to this day.