Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
(I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)
I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"
Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info
Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too
I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
But I wanted to agree with you very much. Lots of behind the scenes/tech stuff as well. Some of our protocols and technical approaches have lived on and very broadly. Exchange ActiveSync, for example. One technology that didn't live long (for obvious reasons) but I still had a lot of fun working on was recognizing when a phone was being dropped to automatically seat the hard drive heads to prevent head/disc damage. How else were you going to fit 2GB of mp3s on your phone if it didn't have a spinning drive?
If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.
But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...
To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.
First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.
As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.
The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be very disappointed with the device.
But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero, so I didn't try to talk them out of it.
It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for smartphones of the time.
Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for them to operate that they never asked for me help. And since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer apps available.
Their experience was the polar opposite of what I envisioned it would be.
Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.
Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a better system for frontend development.
WP7 was the first of the new OS
That then became WSL1