Second, I think the WP8 UI very divisive. You either love it or you don't. Personally, I think it's a Pepsi. Sweet on first impression, but cumbersome to use every day. Too much scrolling (can't use muscle memory) and giant typography which distract from the content.
Can you even buy a WP8 phone yet? Give it a year after it's released before passing judgment on its app ecosystem.
You're confusing the old with the new.
Their whole deal here is that they are re-inventing the product line. It's not the old WP flop anymore.
> Personally, I think it's a Pepsi. Sweet on first impression, but cumbersome to use every day.
That's coming from someone that's never even used it once!
Personally, I think they have an awesome product. Once MS and manufacturers gear up their marketing, we'll see what happens.
And I did use WP7 for a week. My impressions of the Metro-style are that it is love-or-hate and I fall into the latter. WP8 is a continuation the Metro design language.
Could you expand on what you see as a proper app ecosystem?
- It can't be the tooling, Visual Studio and .NET have a pretty huge install bases.
- Is it the distribution channel?
- Is it that there aren't 60,000,000 apps like for Android? If so that number should be reduced down to about the ~5000 apps that are actually worth a crap in Android in which case Windows phone would probably stack up pretty well.
- It can't be moentization, just yesterday most of read of the heartbreaking case of Retickr (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4475918), after a year of nearing the top of the app store for iPhone (which is assumed to be a more profitable demographic) they still shut down after burning through (some/all?) founder savings, plus a seed round plus a funding round. It seems if you make a profit in ANY app ecosystem you are an outlier.
What is Microsoft missing that would make it "proper"?
Apps on par with Android and iOS. Sure WP has a Twitter app, but it's ancient. Several other popular "must-have" apps are there, but are not at feature parity with competing platforms.
I think that's the one big thing Windows Phone is missing: versions of apps that don't suck, and don't lag features behind competing platforms.
Outside the Microsoft crowd, developer/buyer interest is virtually non-existent, which is sad because I think it's a rather great platform. It's fast, pretty, elegant and useful.
I can't speak to all the competing apps. I do wish there were a version of DragonBox algebra for WP. That's the only one I've pined for that wasn't available, although I am looking forward to the new Evernote mobile features making their way over to me eventually.
On the desktop this is the case. But on phones and tablets it has been universally praised, except by Android fanboys.