Windows Phone nears 10% share in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone nears 10% share in Europe

electronista.com

52 pointsarunitc61 comments

The article is confusing and misleading.

One thing is that the 10% of the new phones that are sold now are WP, and another completely different thing is that WP has a 10% share in Europe.

According to statcounter WP penetration in Europe is still ~3% http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-eu-monthly-201309-20130...

When releasing a disguised press release, you can be a little loose with your math.

For example, say your overall market share is roughly 3.1% of the entire market. You just had a banner month and your sales were roughly 7.7% of total sales for the segment for that month. You can honestly say that your market share is "nearing" 10%. You say this knowing that many people will just read the headline or skim through the body. Now, many have a mental picture of your company actually having 10% market share.

Not misleading at all. "Market share" means exactly that -- the share of the market for smartphones.

Installed base is a different concept from market share.

Statcounter is a proxy for installed base rather than market share. It therefore presents an outdated picture of a fast-moving market. Blackberry above Windows Phone? iOS with 3/4 the share of Android?

Statcounter shouldn't ever be seen as representing marketshare or installed base, rather it represents usage share. If you buy a device but put in a drawer, it counts as market share but since it isn't being used day by day, it wouldn't count as usage share.

I wonder if the reason Nokia hasn't been crowing about the marketshare numbers in Europe is that it is a Pyrrhic victory won with massive discounts. If they are displacing their own feature phones (but without the profit margin), it would create the impression of an installed base, when people are primarily using it for telephony and texting.

The thing is the Windows Phone is actually quite good. In many ways it is better then Android (consistency across the OS & apps, Visual Studio is better then Eclipse, C# better then Java). Much, if not all, of the bold choices around flat visual style have now born out as great choices. Lots of things going for them. Pretty cool seeing it born out in higher adoption numbers.

Eclipse has always been terrible, but IDEA on the other hand is the best development environment in existence, regardless of platform. Even Google finally realised that Eclipse is a dead horse and switched the official environment to IDEA.

This reminds me the slow but steady grow of Chrome a few years ago over IE. I don't think MS would dominate those markets but it is healthy to have a firm third alternative.

I hope they will not do to WP what Google is doing to Chrome (hiding the recently closed tabs, pushing the crappy Chrome app store etc.).

This reminds me of Windows Mobile around 1998, 1999 or so. Palm was so vastly far ahead everyone thought that WinMo was laughable and Microsoft would never get anywhere. A few years later, Palm was shipping WM.

Agreed, the market's very different, the network effects are stronger, etc.

Yeah.. those were other times though... when MS used to crush their rivals by using its monopoly as an advantage. Remember when people used to use Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Harvard Graphics?

However, today is way different. Developing in Windows is not sexy anymore. Young developers prefer a Mac or a Linux box over Windows, and young windows programmers are seen as substandard developers. All those are insulting stereotypes of course, but are the stereotypes that Microsoft have to deal with unlike the old days.

I just going to grab some popcorn and see what happens :)

Microsoft needs to cut the crap and really streamline the process for developers. If its developer onramp were as easy and painless as, say, Android's, the floodgates would be wide open because it could use the installed base of Windows developers and the superiority of Visual Studio as a dev environment to its advantage. If it does that it has a chance at second place. But as of now it won't climb past a distant third.

Agreed. I picked up a HTC and wanted to start coding for it, came to find out that you can't even test on a device without paying the annual dev fee. With no real monetary prospects in the WP App Store that just ain't gonna happen.

Well that's a load of shit as I haven't paid an annual dev fee and I can deploy to my Lumia 820 and 710 quite happily.

I had to register the device but that was it.

I worked on a WP7 app and we were able to sideload apps with no problem.

When was the last time you saw a really attractive, well-designed Windows application?

It is arguable, but Word, Excel, One Note and Visual Studio comes to my mind.

If you are talking about the new metro style then Fresh paint comes to my mind too.

Those are terrible examples though, not because they're bad programmes but the teams that designed, researched and implemented those design and UX choices are probably bigger than many entire software companies.

Earlier versions of Chrome were quite good :).

--- Edit, deleted comment, thought parent said "Windows Phone", not "Windows". ---

Yesterday, when I used the Github client for Windows.

Some games re pretty nice....and Windows can run games.

You know which kind of substance flows in, when you open the "floodgates" "wide open", right? Try searching for "minion" in the WP store.

Endless streams of pure, clean, unadulterated gold. Right?

> Try searching for "minion" in the WP store.

Heh, you actually can't unless you manually modify the URL to include it. Even then, it needs a second click to convince Microsoft that I did want to see the results.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-au/search?q=minion

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-au/store/search?q=minion

What's wrong with the developer onramp? I thought it was pretty painless to sign up, grab the SDK, and figure out how everything worked. Just curious what beef(s) you have with it.

Android makers need to make money on the phone while MS needs market share credibility. So these users are more valuable to MS than to Android vendors and MS is outbidding Samsung et al with spiffs for salespeople.

Pretty impressive since Nokia had only ever sold 27 million Lumias worldwide up until June 30. Or Kantar has messed up their analysis.

My guess is this is almost all Nokia.

80%+ -- Probably closer to 90% now.

I think this may contribute to a trend away from mobile native apps to web apps (or web apps in native wrapper like phonegap). It's already difficult supporting iOS and Android. But what if WP and maybe Firefox OS also gain significant market share? How many companies can support 3+ dev teams for an app?

Doesn't have to be, Xamarin is doing great with their framework :)

Agreed. Couple Xamarin with something like MVVMCross [1] and it's pretty easy to develop cross platform relatively quickly.

[1]: https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross

I've had a Lumia 920 for about a year now and I'm kind of just tired of not being on the iOS/Android bandwagon. Since I've had the phone, WP hasn't had a meaningful/noticeable update and there are some pretty big flaws.

The biggest being no central notification center. If you receive a toast notification from more than 5 applications (you can pin 5 to your lock screen) you'll have to hunt for the 6th app's tile on your "home?" screen (the hot mess of tiles dumped onto your screen) just to see if you have a notification or not. Assuming you have 2 email accounts (1 work, 1 personal) and send text messages, this means that you really can only afford to put 2 other apps on your lock screen. Hilariously, if the application isn't on your home/tile screen, swiping over to the applications list won't help because the tiles there don't update or display toast notification count.

Another issue that I've noticed more recently (while trying out some of the mediocre applications in yawn-inducing app store) is that, because of the tile driven UI, I don't actually even know the names of some of my applications. The real issue is this: I can't have multiple pages of tiles like iOS & Android, so I have to throw them all onto one page that just turns into a wasteland of small tiles. If you use big ones, this wasteland will become so large that you'll find yourself forgetting about applications on the bottom so I try to keep it small. The other problem this causes though is that I'll "unpin" rarely used applications which sends them to the applications list... but because I'm used to seeing them as a tile, I don't even know THE NAME OF THE APPLICATION so I have to scroll around this application list looking at the tiles hoping that I spot this thing like some kind of police lineup. This sounds stupid, but it happens... I'm talking about rarely used applications.

I'm sure I could think of more. Most of these problems are just subtle annoyances... lots of little "workflow" issues that go unrecognized until you really start to use the phone a lot. Restricting tiles to 1 screen really sucks. I try to include only the apps that I use often on my home screen... but everything else... I'll never touch it again. Remove a tile from the home screen is a big deal. As soon as you demote something from the home screen, you'll probably never use it again. If I had the luxury of multiple pages of tiles, I know for a fact that I'd use more of these things, but once your tiles get 20 rows deep it just feels dirty, inefficient and unorganized. Some applications benefit greatly from having a large tile as well... weather apps and stock portfolio apps... so those alone can take up 2 entire rows.

Edit: Another issue that I thought of is that I was assigned some awful XBOX Live username "Player1045748#####" and I've tried to link up my actual XBOX Live account (which I don't ever use anyway), but I can't actually figure out how... so I've just given up. It's not a huge issue for me though, but might be for the gamer types. To WP's credit though, all of the games get lumped into a Games tile

Edit: Sorry, this is really poorly written, I'm not actually as illiterate as this reads.

/rant

I regularly switch between iOS, Android and WP.

I've never felt I was missing the notification center, but I don't want to be notified by more than a few apps, so maybe that's just me.

On your other issue about finding rarely used apps, I don't actually find this is much better on either Android or iOS. You still have to go hunting through screens to find the app you're looking for.

But realistically, for most people, how many apps do they actually use? I'd suggest it is less than 15, excluding Games which go in the games (xbox) tile.

Maybe Windows could do a better job with separating out more app groups similar to games, like media to hold all your video and music related apps.

I have a Lumia 920 too but my experience had been completely different.

I had before an Iphone 3G and an Android 2.3 and don't miss anything as those two. First the camera is hands down the best camera I had use in a mobile phone (I haven't check the new Iphone or the last Lumia though) and I appreciate the new camera app that came with the Amber update.

Xbox Music is also another big thing to me, it just works and I can download the music I want for a reasonable subscription price. Last time I checked Spotify didn't really compared to it and not to mention how painful it is to set it up in Canada.

I haven't had the notification problem yet, but I only really read notifications from 4 apps, all the other ones I don't care.

So I guess it depends on the user, for users like me it just way better.

(PS: Not to mention how good are SkyDrive, OneNote, Word, Excel)

Have you used Google Music? It sounds like it offers roughly the same experience as Xbox Music.

It is not available in Canada yet :(

Also it seems to be streaming only, in which case I couldn't use it when I am on the subway.

I got to play with one at work for testing purpose. The UI is actually not that bad but as with anything Microsoft it had some pretty major flaws... like date and time having to be set manually before SSL certificates works.

That's a bit odd...I know my Lumia picked up the date and time immediately upon finding a cell signal.

Where does this information come from? Article mentions the research firm (Kantar) but I can't find any explanation on where or how they got the numbers.

I still haven't seen one windows phone, only windows tablet.

I'd say half of my "non-technical" friends have old crappy androids (and generally dislike them) and the rest have iPhones or windows phones (and like them). Apart from one hold-out on a Nokia feature phone.

I've not asked but I wonder if early android has put people off going with modern android when upgrade time comes around.

Probably... I had a Gingerbread android and it would be really hard that someone convinces me to go back to that, it was just horrible.

You should see the latest models - they have 8-core CPUs and the scrolling is now almost as smooth as in WP/iOS!

Heh... almost as smooth as my 2-year old dual-core iPhone 4S, or the single-core WP7 HTC Mozart I had before that?

Your friends don't seem very representative of the market.

I bet it depends on the local market. I was at Redmond over the summer and I'd guess the market share was 50% WP, 25% iOS, 25% Android. Some parts of the town have higher WP usage, others less.

Well this is why I'm not surprised that WP is growing in share. For my friends it seems to be if they want to spend money on a "quality" phone they go for apple, if they want a cheap phone then WP. The only people I know with high-end androids are programmers and SEOs.

The only people I saw with Windows Phone were Nokia holdouts - they always bought Nokia and never tried another brand.

Not like that in the UK. They're everywhere.

They're really cheap here (820 = £179 SIM free) and they work perfectly with giffgaff for a mere £15 a month for unlimited SMS, data and 400 mins calls.

There is no better experience for such little cash. Cheap androids are all crappy.

That's the point. In Germany you can get a Lumia 520 for ~130€. And they are quite snappy for such little money.

They are cheap here (in the US) too. You can get a Lumia 521 for less than $100.

I see them quite frequently here in Germany. By far not as often as I see Samsung phones and certainly less frequently than iPhones – but I do see them.

In your typical Deutsche Telekom shop they get about as much shelf space as the iPhone, if not more. Of course, the large wall of Android phones dominates everything.

Funnily enough, today I also saw my first Surface (a Pro) in the wild, used by an American researcher who held a guest lecture at university.

Windows is always going to be behind a free system, especially since all cool features invented by one get copied within a few weeks by others.

At most Microsoft can charge them less but even that will probably more than Android pays in licenses to Microsoft. Not sure what benefits can Microsoft offer them over Google, or maybe for an extra $10 (or whatever the license cost) manufactures won't care. Verizon, ATT and other have a vested interest to promote a third OS so who knows.. Another wild card is Nokia's purchase, Microsoft can easily eat a few dollars and flood the world with phones of all kinds

>> "Windows is always going to be behind a free system"

Why? Linux was/is free and was never able to topple Windows on the desktop. If MS does a good enough job there's no reason they can't beat Android.

The problem with Linux on desktop was never technical, but business. Microsoft made sure no other system, free or not, has a breathing room.

Android does not have that problem.

" Microsoft made sure no other system, free or not, has a breathing room"

I would believe this if Linux didn't dominate Microsoft in the server space.

Linux did hand Microsoft it's lunch--- in areas where the users who know what they were doing get a say.

Linux has always struggled with the non-technical user and ridiculous OS-size gui's have to be written for Linux just to make it palatable by the common user.

> Linux did hand Microsoft it's lunch--- in areas where the users who know what they were doing get a say.

> Linux has always struggled with the non-technical user and ridiculous OS-size gui's have to be written for Linux just to make it palatable by the common user.

I disagree with both statements. I found myself as a technical user that knows what he is doing and I do prefer to work Linux on the server side but I cry of frustration using my linux desktop at work. After all these years it still feels like a buggy hobbyist OS, with visual glitches everywhere.

I think the reason why Windows won't dominate the server space anymore is because Linux is free (as a beer) and a good gui doesn't matter too much over there (it is even inconvenient)

Windows was entrenched first, this time Android (and ios) are. Also Android has an advantage, it is free and has a rich corporate patron.

I don't get it. For me and most of the people I know < age 50, "Windows" is pretty much a synonym for "bloated, insecure, junkware"...

Who in their right mind buys a windows phone?

Perhaps the analyst's report is inaccurate.

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