The incompatibility of apps was lame the first go around. I had bad luck with my devices and so I was out by the time of Windows 10. I didn't know the incompatibility happened a second time.

I don't think the browser or "slow devices" as you say are the reason for its demise at all though. Windows on mobile was a great OS.

I believe even with all the faults you mention, if they were somehow able to get the top 25 to 50 apps onto their store, we would still have Windows mobile around today with a ~10% market share worldwide (varying greatly by country).

Of course getting the apps onto their store would be an undertaking so it's quite hypothetical. My main point is, I firmly believe that is what killed Windows and any other OS that arrived late or never got popular enough by 2011 or so, when a few major apps were already desired by many people or at least the hype and talk would tell people that.

P.S. I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive.

Google actively fought MS on windows phone. It seems silly now that they'd see WP as a threat at all, but even 2-3 years ago they were sabotaging MSs attempts to build a youtube app. MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were. IIRC it was to do with displaying ads. At the time the official google apps did not do ads. MS had to revert to essentially a shortcut to YouTube in the browser.

Aside from that most of the big players were there, but when new trendy app would launch, it would launch on android and IOS. WP users would have to wait for a critical mass of popularity in the hope that there would be a port.

There were many things Microsoft could do, but it seems they weren't fully committed to the platform.

TheVerge reported them paying up to $100,000 to companies to port their apps to the store.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...

That was back in 2013. Foursquare was one of those - MS covered the cost of porting it to WP. They even hired an outside developer team to do it.

I wonder why they did that? Oh yeah, it's exactly like Microsoft not "giving" anything to the Linux desktop, ever.

Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts.

"ever" is a strong word.

Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.

VSCode is indeed part of their cloud strategy. I do not for a moment claim that they did anything benevolent for linux desktop experience -- nor do I expect them to do anything especially for Linux (on the contrary, I expect them to try to kill it).

And still, all I objected was to your use of the word "ever", since VSCode is actually packaged for the linux desktop, and is, IMHO, at the moment the best IDE on linux for quite a few languages.

It seems silly now partly because they fought it back then. Microsoft had their fare share of blunders, but they would have likely done better if Google did not act -- possibly much better.

> MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were.

That's not what happened. MS's app was always in violation of Google's terms of service, and google indeed blocked them -- but there was no "sudden" violation. MS was using the same API that Google was, except it wasn't a public one -- and MS did not display ads on that app, a condition that Google actively enforced on every 3rd party YT app.

Yes, Google's iOS and Android apps used Google's non-public API, and the iOS app at the time did not display ads (the android one did). So? I do not know what kind of agreement Apple and Google had in place at the time, not was one made public -- it is possible that Apple paid for the no-ad experience, and it is possible that Google forgo iOS ad revenue in return for access to iOS users. Whatever - Microsoft was in no position to demand favorable treatment with respect to YouTube, but they gave it to themselves anyway (and suffered Google's hand as a result). Google never was under an obligation to give all 3rd parties the same API they use themselves.

One should also note that the website version of YouTube was perfectly serviceable on iPhones and Androids at the time, but was horrible on Windows Phone because the MS browser was not implementing neither standards or de-facto standards at the time; if MS invested in a reasonable moble browser (or allowed 3rd party ones), their users would likely have had a reasonable YouTube experience.

Another thing that happened more or less at the same time, which I am sure is intimately related: Microsoft asserted patents to make Google pay to make Exchange protocol available on gmail accounts, and threatening Android manufacturers left and right on infringements. Then, more or less a week after Windows Phone came out, an capitalized on the Exchange protocol (everything else wasn't as well implemented or executed -- but who cares, Gmail, Exchange and outlook supported it), Google announced that "due to Microsoft's licensing fees, users of the free tier of Gmail will no longer get Exchange protocol on a new device" -- meaning that no Windows Phone user could get a proper gmail experience on their phone. Microsoft immediately replied with "no no no, please, have it free for all users", but Google did not change their stance.

Microsoft made the bed, completely on their own.

My first smartphone was a Palm Pre. I then switched to some of the first kind-of-mature android phones, like the HTC Desire and the Galaxy S2.

I remember feeling like I had taken a huge leap forward in hardware, but a backwards leap in software.

Even today I miss some things of WebOS. WebOS nailed the experience of having two documents of the same app. Each "card" could be a document, or a view into something, and each app could have several of those.

A short while ago I tried to write an email for which I needed to look often at another previous email. This is trivial on any desktop, but was a mayor pain on the mobile device I tried it (can't remember if Android tablet or iPad, but I doubt it's very different).

(If I recall correctly, Android today allows apps to expose several "Cards", or several views at the same time in the task switcher, but no apps do. For a while Chrome had an option to treat every tab as an independent card, which I liked but was messy for many people...

Every time I use a mobile device for anything serious, I think "This would be so much more comfortable and natural on Mac/Windows/Linux" every 5 minutes. May be it's just I'm antiquated.)

As opposed to Apple requiring you to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? I doubt that having to install Windows 8 - especially since you could use a VM - was a large deterrent to a lot of people.

The first wave of ios apps came from Mac developers; then people started buying macs to build ios apps. The first wave of WP apps didn't come .... because there were very few people who could build an app on their existing dev environment (win8 uptake among developers was abysmal).

Furthermore, the first ios wave actually came from the homebrew scene, which organically grew and produced ios apps even before Apple provided an SDK; There was never such enthusiasm for MS to build on. The WP8 requirement was just adding insult to injury.

Microsoft killed S60 (Symbian) and kept S40 for their lower phones, when S60 could have just become the base.

It used a C++ dialect called Symbian C++, basically Hungarian notation everywhere, special semantics how objects were created (Two-phase creation), strings could not be used directly, ARM trap errors instead of exceptions, and so on.

They also rebooted the SDK multiple times, initially Code Warrior based, then a set of Eclipse CDT plugins, then they rebooted it and created another Eclipse attempt called Caride.

They eventually added POSIX support (PIPS), but just nowadays with Android, due to lack of updates, not every device could take apps that made use of PIPS.

Then came Qt, but it was pretty much WIP by the time the burning platform memo came to be.

Also, it was a great OS for tinkerers because it wasn't hard to gain access to the OS files and play around with stuff, install sis and jar files, modify signatures (alright, that's a bit shady but I was ten, give me a break) and whatnot, but I imagine the lack of a central app store until much later did the platform no good either, because apps were slightly hard to find for a general user, and carriers (where I lived) often scammed users by offering free jar apps picked from the web on their portals for absurd amount of money.

Plus it had ask-on-use permissions built-in before the iPhone was even a thing.

There was also UIQ. Used by Sony Ericsson on their P series, and Motorola in various models.

When Windows Phone 7 and 8 came out, other than Android what other alternatives existed for OEMs to use as an OS to compete head to head with the iPhone? There was only Android. Without Android, in 2010 and 2012 they'd have had no choice but to form a queue and sign licensing agreements with Microsoft for 7 and 8.

Even if the Pre had succeeded, that wouldn't fundamentally have changed anything because it wasn't a licensed OS, aside from the persistent hardware and software quality issues that held it back. Microsoft would still have been the only viable option for companies like Samsung, Sony, HTC, etc and Windows Phone 7 and 8 were fine platforms. They could absolutely have competed with the iPhone just as successfully as Android did. They were just too late because Android was already out there and already had the apps.

lol, but it did exist. TBH, when MS started their phone efforts, I think even Symbian was still around, and other operators had their own pet projects here and there - which is what the status quo was like before the iPhone anyway. So MS knew very well from the start that they had to be better than existing competition, they couldn't just stroll in and hoover up the market.

WP was a pretty bad MS fumble. They had the brand and the market clout to nail it, and they lost it to a competitor that all but followed their original Windows blueprint: give the OS more or less away (with Windows, through tolerated piracy; with Android, through opensource licensing) to get de-facto monopoly, and then leverage it in more lucrative areas (for Windows, Office and enterprise software; for Android, Google's own services and datamining).

This gave them the sense of ownership of the devices. It was theirs and the device did whatever they wanted. If you didn't want anything to do with Google - you could.

iOS was walled garden. Microsoft also tried to make WP into walled garden, controlling, what's running on the device and getting their cut.

It changed during 2.2/2.3 era, when it became mainstream. With 4.0, even the hardcore early adopters didn't bother anymore. At that age, the OS was already well established.

Back when 1.x shipped, all internal storage (emmc?) was dedicated to the firmware/os and apps.

user data like images and music were expected to be stored on an SD card.

But later OEMs started partitioning the emmc in two, with the smaller partition housing the firmware and apps, and the larger being mounted as if it was an SD card.

Come 2.x this got official blessing, with the introduction of "move to SD" (more like "copy some static data to SD").

But people found this to be constrained, so they would root and use tools like LinkToSD to basically set up a EXT partition on an SD card and move whole apps there, using symlinks or something to make them appear to still be in the firmware partition.

Come 4.x the user data partition was replaced with a union mount. Thus writes to /sdcard ended up somewhere else in the FS. Later versions piggybacked on this to provide support for multiple users.

Note that 4.x was also the intro of MTP for wired data transfers. This because earlier the "SD card" had to be unmounted from Android to allow a PC to access it over USB.

And now we have the Storage Access Framework, that piggyback on the plumbing introduced with MTP to offer apps limited RW access to storage areas without the need for certain permissions.

It was really sad to see the established players freak out like that.

I especially remember FB messages taking hours to arrive sometimes...at its fastest there would be a delay of several minutes. So much for "instant messaging". At least back then you could still access messages in the browser.

Blackberry also implemented the Hubs feature in its BB10 and Android devices, but again functionality is pretty limited, by design. IM is a big business, and the companies behind it aren't interested in your using them outside of their own app, as you'd be deprived of using "innovations" like Stories, GIF addons and emoji packs.

Facebook and Twitter want you using their apps, so they aren't incentivized to play nicely with a concept like Hubs. Towards the end of Windows Phone 8.1 they opened it up to the apps themselves to implement Hub support, rather than Microsoft's team having to keep up to date with the API, but then again Facebook and Twitter don't have any incentive to support the Hubs that well (or even at all) when they really want your eyeballs directly in their own app.

The true death of the Hubs, though was the teams in question being handed over to the Skype brand and new features that would have gone to the hubs going instead to Skype-branded apps. It makes sense for Microsoft to attach a real brand to it, especially if they are making a play to bring more of those features cross-platform (which it sounds like is the goal: the Timeline stuff that's been announced is a differently organized, more app-centric approach to some of the Hubs; the People Hub is now on the Windows 10 taskbar, with deeper Skype integration; etc).

It's sad to see some defining features of Windows Phone 8 get broken up and parceled out into different apps, and there's definitely a question that if those things become way more cross-platform (including iOS and Android support) what becomes of Windows mobile, what is left for its unique and/or flagship features? (Other than maybe being a full Windows PC given the x86 on ARM rumors?)

The plugins never materialized. Every third party wanted complete control over it's app, which later developed into stores for digital goods, wallets, etc.

The situation was not helped by the fact, that there was no such system on iOS and the only way for a messenger to wait for messages on the background were push notifications from Apple servers. Here people expected separate apps for separate chat networks.

So basically what we have today is exactly what the market wanted.

If "the market" means "companies" then yes. "Users", not so much.

Much like Apple getting rid of Flash, if MS had a dominant market position they could have forced a user-friendly trend. Alas.

When it was pointed to them, what they could have ("all the instant messaging in a single app"), the answer was a blank stare and a reply, why would they want that, they are perfectly fine launching separate apps.

Dear god. As someone who just had to battle Win8 on a corporate laptop from a vendor... I'm shocked WP did as well as it did if this is true.

Never had any problems with WP browser. I really liked that address bar was at the bottom, and the quirks didn't bother me that much.