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Comment by jmkni | Hacker News Reader

I unironically loved my Windows Phone, it was great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time

It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.

No, the death of Windows Phone was 95% the fault of MS/Nokia.

Pre-announcing that they were leaving all Winphone 7 customers behind for Winphone 8 meant that every retailer/distributor was left with unsellable stock (because they hadn't gained enough traction to sell out initial shipments).

If this was because Nokia made bad/cheap phones that were un-upgradeable or MS being arrogant isn't something I'm remembering anymore but the end-result was pissed retailers and nobody selling WP8.

The spec for wp8 was a lot higher than wp7. There was a bit change from WinCE kernel to WinNT kernel, etc. Without much confidence, I think wp8 was dual core or higher and wp7 was single core... and maybe there was a ram upgrade too.

All that said, WP8 did a lot better than WM10, where the WP8 phones were promised to be upgradable, and then the promise was walked back for low mem phones, and the experience was poor for qualifying phones anyway.

The final build of WM10 was actually ok on my Lumia 640; but that was way after everything was canceled and mobile Edge (this was the first non Chrome Edge) was still less usable than mobile IE, even though the renderer was better.

The really poor rollout of wm10, plus the tradition of forcing developers to make split builds to support multiple versions of windows phone/mobile made things pretty bad at the end. Calling the build for WM10 only 'universal' was icing on the cake. Android has all sorts of problems, but you can have a single APK that works on lots of versions, with some amount of new features get pushed to old OS with libraries and some new features have to be detected at runtime and use alternate flows. On the other hand, Microsoft kept making new features require using new foundation libraries that were unavailable on old phones. WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WP8.1 -> WM10 was too many step changes and developers bailed at each one. Meanwhile on the desktop, a 32-bit win32s application targeting windows 3.1 has a good chance of running on windows 11.

Also, they managed to make upgrade from wp8 to wm10 break installed apps sometimes. That wasn't great.

#notbitter

On Android, if you try to make an APK that is compatible with both old versions and new versions of Android, you get a ton of scary warnings when you attempt to install it.

That was the final nail in the coffin. The reason why they didn't hit adoption in the first place is because Google prohibited their application on MS devices. Mobile YouTube already wasn't good enough, and without the rest of the GSuite (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Calendar, Translate) it was dead in the water. And no, HERE maps and third-party clients were not good enough to tip the scale.

Google Mail and Calendar was fine; Google had an exchange connector at the time which worked well. (or well enough)

But maybe Google would have updated their WinCE apps to WP7 if Microsoft didn't make them throw all their work away.

This wasn't (only) about Google refusing to make apps for the WP, it was Google actively preventing WP apps from accessing their services where they could. Microsoft made a very nice YouTube client, for example, and Google simply denied YT access if they detected you were using it.

Google had said they were killing the exchange connector and only changed their mind at the very end after Microsoft had written the workaround.

Retailers couldn't sell what the carriers didn't want on their networks. The carriers had momentum from consumer demand to keep selling iPhones. The carriers were given a lot of the "keys to the car" by Android and carriers were really happy with the ability to modify Android and/or micro-manage it, so they had a lot of incentive to focus on Android.

In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy and less likely to want to sell it, which ultimately left it the case in the US at a point where only one US carrier at a time was even "exclusively" selling the latest Windows Phone hardware, and only through its dedicated retailers. It took too long for Microsoft to also realize that part of the iPhone plan in the first place was direct to consumer sales and pressuring the phone carriers to provide SIMs rather than making "exclusive" hardware deals with carriers and hoping other carriers would try to compete for buying your hardware as well.

> In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy

Carriers were especially unhappy that Microsoft bought Skype at the time and tried to run it as a loss-making business to undermine carrier voice and messaging revenues.

Add to that the fact that the 8 to 8.1 was also a mess, devices that were promised as 8.1 compatible were dropped from the upgrade.

I put the blame squarely on Microsoft, how they released a turd with WP7 (a shiny one with responsive UI, but nonetheless a turd).

About phone OS upgrades, remember the HTC HD2 which originally released with WM6.5 but could be upgraded to WP7 and then to WP8 through after-market community ROMs. It was also Microsoft's decision to not officially allow that.

The XDA and Compaqs etc were WAY ahead of what anyone else had (even better than Sony’s PDAs) and yet they totally fumbled their lead

Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.

The Nokia Lumia 800 remains for me the best phone design I ever experienced. It was flashy, comfortable in hand and felt sturdy

If you liked that you would have loved the N9 (same body but with Linux-based OS).

I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.

Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...

There are dozens of us. Loved the Lumia hardware, loved maybe not that lack of polish in places but the overall UI vision was mostly well executed. Its rigid experience across apps feels quaint now, but if we had this focus now, we wouldn’t be seeing the Light Phone, b/w UI hacks, etc pop up.

The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.

the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!

Nokia's hardware managed to prove to me, that plastic done RIGHT, is just as good if not more practical than the metals we have today. They looked fantastic, legitimately didn't require a case, and held up very well.

Some time after Apple discontinued the plastic Macbooks, I took mine in to get the battery replaced.

I remember overhearing one of the sales folk having to explain to a woman that they can't sell her the white ones, only metal ones as she preferred the chunky plastic.

And on most Lumias, if your phone got scratched, lost its shine, or you just got tired of the color, you could just walk to the store and get a new "shell".

Nokias hardware has always been pretty good. Heck, some of the nokia branded HMD stuff is well built for the price

Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.

However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.

I bought a 4G Nokia 3310 yesterday, and to be honest, it’s actually not bad!

How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?

In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.

In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.

They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.

It was about 10% in Europe when they killed it, many people that could not go for Apple due to their prices where actually going for Windows Phone, because the native code (WinRT/.NET Native/C++/CX), provided a much better experience in low end phones than Dalvik with its lousy JIT was capable of at the time.

I was one of them, initially getting a Lumia as second phone even though as ex-Nokia I was kind of pissed off, developing for UAP/UWP grew on me and was much more fun than dealing with Android.

Now given how Microsoft has messed up the whole UWP, Project Reunion and WinUI/WinAppSDK I would assert there is no faith left.

I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.

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