There is a reason Google paid close to 3 billon USD to stay the default search provider on iOS. They had several opportunities to pull their apps from the platform, but they never did. It’s not random. They acknowledge that Apple is not in direct competitior as far as their core business is concerned — unlike Microsoft. They can still be the primary search provider on iOS, but Microsoft would never let that happen on Windows Phone/Mobile thanks to Bing. In fact, there was no way to set the search engine to Google in Edge for a while - and the OS wide search never offered a choice.
Allowing Windows Phone/Mobile to flourish would have meant allowing Bing to grow - something Google can’t afford. As long as Apple doesn’t become a threat to their core business, I don’t think they are going to pull their apps. And even if they do, iOS has become too big to die like Windows Phone/Mobile.
And let’s not forget, the organisations charged with preventing monopoly will slap Google with antitrust lawsuits all over the world.
And yet... they purposefully have ipad mini google search results only show in a crappy 'mobile' format, vs the regular way it used to ('normal desktop' for safari). It's bizarre, has been broken for years. Doesn't matter if they're "default", we've moved to yahoo and ddg for ipad searching. :/
no reason to explicit fuck it up, except... oh yeah, competitor to your own tablets.
I haven’t used an Android tablet in a long time, but I think those load the mobile version as well.
And lastly, I’ve never had a problem with the mobile version — I actually prefer it on touch based devices.
I personally found this slimy and a very shitty way to sell Windows phones. Technologically, it's a great phone (I had both - Android and Windows from HTC). It was fast, fluid and almost didn't have any lags. Ethically speaking, I'm glad their sneaky sales didn't work out and Windows phone is dead.
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/microso...
I worked at Google at the time, and I joked that if Apple were to go out of business and iPhones became unavailable, I'd have to go with a Windows phone. It was only partly a joke. WP had the consistency that Android never did, and never will have, and it had fluid, polished user experience even on the very low end.
> The problems with that, according to Google, are three: the app enables users to download YouTube videos, prevents ads from being shown, and plays videos whose owners have set to only play on certain platforms. Microsoft’s app, Google says, violates the YouTube terms of service, and uses the YouTube logo in a way that contravenes the company’s branding guidelines.
Is this just an excuse used by Google, or did they really have these features? Because I could understand why Google doesn't want a service to demonitize their service. Why wouldn't Microsoft just remove those features? It seems like a reasonable response.
It would also be trivial for google to make a basic app for the 3rd biggest phone OS.
But since Google makes an OS and doesn’t want other OSes, any actions they have other than support are suspect.
It’s like when MS said that it was possible for PC sellers to not bundle IE. Sure it’s possible, but it was just BS because it was completely MS’ prerogative.
The download feature certainly could have been pulled from Microsoft
It’s kind of a dick move all around because it means no one can build (popular) YouTube ads except google. And they don’t build for platforms that threaten them unless they must.
In the "Platform" battlefields you have Microsoft, Apple and Google fighting for the end-users. On the infrastructure side Amazon is also making a play here with all of the AWS options and Google and Microsoft are also fighting there.
In the "Social" battlefield, you have Facebook, with Microsoft+LinkedIn+Xbox carving out some niches and Google flailing wildly at everything.
In the "Creepy Stalkering" battlefield (which overlaps some with Social) you have Facebook getting people to give up data and Google just silently watching .everything.you.do. muahahahaha. Facebook also watches as much as possible via website badges and sharing, but doesn't have near the reach of Google with searches + Analytics.
I'm sure there are other battlefields I'm not listing here including things like overlap into the offline world ("Political Influence" anyone?), but it's far from just a 2-sided battle.
But they’re obliged to spend resources making open APIs?
Any actions they have are suspect because they’re a big fucking corporation that vacuums up our data and lobbies government for beneficial treatment
Let’s not wrap it up in overly customized excuses for their shit behavior. A more generally phrased definition will suffice and probably be more beneficial
If it’s just market assholery, that’s the market
If it’s acceptance of the reality they control us through plain behavior of buying and selling our data and buying influence, that’s broadly more captivating
The other infamous Google move towards Windows Phone was blocking access in certain ways to Google Maps.
For me personally, this is not true. I had a windows phone for about a year and it sucked, and I do mean SUCKED for daily use. At the time, I didn't use apps apart from email.
Sure animations were smooth, but after the first two times looking at them, they are too slow and 'in your face', making the phone feel slow.
Live tiles were annoying rather than useful because often I couldn't tell what clicking on the tile would do. Whatever reviewers tell you, pictures are not as good as simple icons if you want to open an app fast. The only good thing is I think there was a way to turn them off.
Basic things like having a separate audio level for media vs ringtone were missing.
Even something as simple as swiping up to unlock the phone, you swipe up to pull the lock screen up and unlock the phone, but often when unlocking the phone one handed, I couldn't push it far enough; instead of unlocking, the shade would drop back down and bounce on the bottom of the screen. This happened a LOT and it was really annoying.
I tried to use it but it was a terrible, terrible, horrible experience.
What version were you using and when? Mine always had 2 settings ("Media + Apps" and "Ringer + Notifications"). For that matter, the fact that it brought up the media controls (at least to pause/advance) when you hit the volume buttons was very handy since it allowed control without unlocking.
The article is looking at Windows Phone with a lot of rosy glasses. Sure, WP had tiles and neither iOS nor Android have them, but WP had been behind on tons of other features that Android users had been enjoying for years, starting with apps being able to call each other indirectly (the intent system).
WP failed because it was late in the game but also because overall, it was inferior to Android on most fronts.
Arguing that the users did it, is the same as arguing why people only use Google or Facebook.
And yes, people use Google and Facebook because these two tools are the best in their category, not because the companies performed some kind of brainwashing on users.
It's perfectly legal (and healthy in a free trade economy) to be a monopoly.
What's illegal is leveraging that monopoly to enter other markets, which is what Microsoft attempted to do.
And the page turning problem also occurs on my Kindle Oasis.
Very stable and responsive on hardware nowhere near what the current gen Android had.
Google has actually been pretty eager in developing iOS apps AFAIK, sometimes releasing it even sooner than Android platform. If Windows Phone really gained traction, maybe Google will develop apps for it too. Remember it's more of a service company than a hardware company.
But MS never got out of that vicious cycle. Can't shift blame to its competitors.
Their support for iOS is second-class for more than a few apps; like Inbox for Gmail.
This doesn’t make any sense since Google used to be really supportive of new platforms and services. This was back when goog was just playing around with using lock-in to their advantage
Well, you know, that's what Microsoft has been doing throughout its history, and still does. It's not bad when those giants get a taste of their own medicine.
I am not a power user of MS Office, but the ones I know tell me that the macOS version still lacks features compared to Windows.
And lastly, where is MS Access for macOS?
By the way, is the XML Office file format really open — to the extant where one can create a third party client which works as well as the official one without reverse engineering?
Initial release 7 December 2006; 11 years ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
On the other hand, Linux is pretty much everywhere other than desktop/laptop, which are becoming increasingly less relevant.
Perhaps demise is too strong a word, but decline from its status as the apex predator of the industry is more appropriate. MS is still powerful, but it is no longer the King.
Apple devices obviously don't run it, Android and ChromeOS might have Linux underneath but only expose Java, JavaScript, ANSI C/C++ lib and Android specific native APIs.
Android P could be released with a complete different kernel and only OEMs would notice, all user space apps would be kept running.
So is Windows. And on servers, Linux is the king.
The comment was in response to the sarcastic comment about The Year of Linux Desktop. I am not really debating Linux vs others here.
Our Java, .NET and C++ servers don't care 1 second on which OSes they are actually running.
I have seen the same application with drastically different performance characteristics on different platforms.
Linux is the king on the server because it has been heavily fine tuned for the server over the ages. The cost, while a factor, is not as relevant. Any company deploying large scale applications on Linux has to hire enough engineers to keep it running that the cost of Windows is largely offset. If it were just a matter of cost, we’d see more deployments of FreeBSD and the likes.
It is the same reason people stick to Java despite all its shortcomings.
The only reason UNIX shops migrated to Linux was to avoid paying for workstations and migrate to Linux.
Companies like SGI dropped their UNIX and are having Linux forks, as a means to outsource development costs.
Likewise with Oracle dumping Solaris and migrating whatever is relevant to Oracle Linux.
In 100% of projects I have been involved, Linux was always chosen as means to reduce license costs, as developers do 100% of their work on Windows workstations.
Just to give you an example, the file format tells you that there is a foot note. If the footnote doesn't fit on the page, then you have to paginate it (continue it on the next page). The file format doesn't tell you how or when to do that -- it just tells you that there is a footnote. Word happens to paginate footnotes incorrectly. Word Perfect paginates footnotes correctly. To import a Word document perfectly, somehow you have to break the pagination of the footnotes -- something that is practically impossible to do with a file importer.
Microsoft can't fix the pagination of footnotes because that's the way they've always done it. If they fixed the pagination, they would break decades of existing legal documents (which all have really long footnotes). They could add a new feature to paginate them correctly and tag them in the file format: For example "Here is a footnote. Paginate it correctly/incorrectly". I don't think they ever did that with footnotes, but they definitely did for a lot of other features (It's been over 10 years since I looked at the spec, so I can't give you a good example, unfortunately). Basically, you will see in the spec an option that says, "Render like Word 95", or something equivalent.
If you want to render Word documents perfectly (as well as your own), for each feature you need to be able to render it in your native style, and in style that Word has ever used -- even if these are fundamentally broken from a layout perspective. And then you have to add all of those Word styles to your file format, or else if you import it into your file format, you won't be able to save it.
Nobody does that, for obvious reasons. It's not Microsoft's fault. The opposite is exactly the same. That's why MS dug in their heels about not using Open Office file format -- it's an insane idea. I'm not a big fan of MS as a whole, but I interacted with the Word team a lot when I worked on conversions for Word Perfect. They were always extremely helpful -- to the point of sending me bug reports when I made a mistake on the conversions. They always knew that interoperability of their file format was only in their best interest and they did their best. Word is just a massive legacy system and they have their hands tied -- mainly because they always bend over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility for their customers.
I understand the feeling you are trying to get at, but in this case it is entirely misplaced.
The one example I remember being mentioned at some point is that the google search bar widget must be on the first home page of any phone sold by OEMs (of course users are free to change that if they wish). Other little things like that. Instead of making money from licenses, Google makes money by nudging users into its ad-revenue generating services.
Some of the larger OEMs might be able to negotiate revenue sharing agreements from Play purchases, but inside the Google Apps is definitely where Google makes its money, on app sales and ad targeting based on data collected by Google hoovering up everyone's mobile data and location.
The fact is that iPhones and iOS dominate the revenue of the mobile market[1]. iPhone users have incredibly high customer satisfaction numbers[2] and are unlikely to switch, so essentially you are competing against Android which is already "open". Seems like an easy way to loose a ton of money to me.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-the-iphone-x-drives-apples...
[2] https://marketrealist.com/2017/06/could-apples-iphone-8-driv...
[3] https://www.imore.com/apple-seeing-record-rate-android-users...
So you've conducted a poll and asked what people want? People don't care if the OS is open or closed source. In fact, the extreme majority wouldn't even know what you're talking about. They care about having access to the apps and services they want. Microsoft failed with a closed source OS and they'll fail even harder with an open one too.
My thesis is that even if you wanted to make a very good WP app, you needed to work harder and be more of an expert than if you wanted a decent app on other platforms, and some device capabilities would be off the table. Too many people attribute the lack of apps to the lack of interest, which sure is a big factor, but nobody asks if it was technically feasible to have a large number of decent apps.
Therefore, this statement doesn't make sense to me:
"For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth."
When the platform was still new and well supported, and without any discounts or contracts, you could get Windows Phones at the ~$100 USD price that were every bit as fast and fluid as described. Phones like the Lumia 520 / 530 / 535 series.
So, if the discounted price bothers you, just read it as "For a $100 phone", as that was the brand-new day-one price at the time, with no subsidies / discounts / contract / credit-checks / loss write-off / etc.
Where "apps" means "app", and "Google's services" means "YouTube".
No it wasn't. As the previous owner of 2 windows phones the platform was anything but fast or smooth, but it sure did like resuming a lot. You should upload a video of your phone on YouTube so that we can count all of the frame drops and stutters. And those slow superfluous animations they used still couldn't mask all of the hitches.
>The tile interface worked well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used (even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft, not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android.
Firmware updates aren't provided by Microsoft and can only be updated by the OEM.
>As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0] which Google also shut down.
Windows phone supporters should really stop trying to blame Google for the incompetence of Microsoft. Microsoft controlled their own fate and they alone are responsible for its demise. From their constant reboots, their abandonment of the previous OS, the constant changes to the development and tooling that did nothing but confuse and frustrate developers and they even had the arrogance to tell OEM's what they could and could not do with their OS.
If there's anything Windows phone should be remembered for it's how it systematically destroyed Nokia's device division like a cancer.
I am not convinced of this. Aside from the widely used social networking apps, most people just use default apps on their phones for email, the web, and text messaging. Kids play games too, I suppose.
To me, it never felt like Microsoft made a sincere push for establishing Windows Phone into the market. Aggressive subsidies, pricing, and features should have been able to get a footprint. They pulled it off with Xbox, and of course with PCs, so they could certainly do it again with commoditized phone hardware if they were committed to it.
Discovery was fundamentally broken, if you had no good idea of what you where doing. Around 2014/2015 the ecosystem had pretty much no apps or at least functionality missing, besides snapchat and instagram (which was added at some point).
The email client was fine IIRC, particularly if you were connecting to Exchange for work since it's Outlook. For Gmail on the other hand, well, it was IMAP. I'm pretty sure that's improved a lot over the years, but for a long time I think there was a lot that was broken about using Gmail with IMAP - little things like IMAP not being so great for handling tags.
The web browser situation was pretty poor. Edge for a long time was what you'd expect from a brand-new written-from-scratch browser - immature and not really ready for prime time. Unfortunately there weren't any other options that were really great either (Squirrel Browser? Monument? I think that's it) and nothing with a significant development team behind it.
Text messaging was interesting - IIRC, it was a "Model T color choice" situation. You used the built-in messaging app, because security features meant that there not only were not any others but that there could not be any others. I'm not sure about iOS, but on Android there are some very successful alternative messaging apps (Textra, Handcent, Go, maybe some others).
None of those are critical but thing like that is annoying.
But what would really be neat is if they bought DuckDuckGo instead, made it the search engine of choice, and expanded on it's abilities. Apple has quite a lot of cash to throw at such a problem and DDG would line up nicely with their stance on privacy.
I wouldn't be surprised if they've given something like that serious consideration. Much the way Google tries to break Apple's grip on high-end smartphones, Apple probably wants to keep some leverage of their own.
So they should buy DDG and get back into the ad business? I'm sure that would play out well.
The article mentioned this as well - could you please elaborate on why the Windows keyboard is so good? I've used an Android phone for 4 years and still find the keyboard fiddly, so would love to learn about alternatives.
And other than that, it had no other redeeming qualities.
[1] It is evident by the fact that Google is still trying to fix the fundamentals like permissions, updates etc. Android is essentially what you get when you try to cram an OS primarily used on servers and high end workstations on a mobile phone and pair it with a programming environment which is also used primarily used on servers by implementing a quick and dirty runtime from scratch.
I'd ask you to cite some examples of why Android is a "low bar to clear", but I doubt I'd get back anything of substance.
>Android was, and remains, a Frankenstein’s monster[1] which was hastily cobbled together at Google to capitalise on the new marked created by the iPhone before MS could lock them out of it.
Could you point to the Android github examples that support your claims that Android is a Frankenstein’s monster which was hastily cobbled together? You see, that's the nice thing about being an open source OS - you can actually see the source code and call out people for making ridiculous comments about things they have no idea of what they're talking about.
>In fact, if MS had brought WP 8 sometime in 2010, the story would be a lot different.
No it wouldn't have. It would have played out exactly the way it did.
Starting with Eclipse, then rebooting the whole development environment just because some management guys happened to be InteliJ users.
Several years later there are still Eclipse based tools, like the graphical manifest editor, that haven't been replicated in Studio.
NDK is treated as a 20% project, done by an handfull of engineers.
Devs were left in the cold when the migration away from Eclipse was decided. It was only due to the coincidence of Clion being developed, that Studio eventually got C++ support.
The amount of cruft on NDK build tools is a joke, already with 4 official variations.
The decision to use Gradle has made "how to optimize builds" a recorrent topic in any major Android conference.
Google teams like Android development build tools so much that they rather use blaze, throwing yet another build tool into the mix.
There isn't a single release of Android Studio or the Support Library, that isn't followed by bug related complaints on online forums, despite being several weeks, months, in testing phase.
Their initial emulator implementations was so lousy, that it required the public shame of Genymotion and Microsoft doing a better job for Google actually improving theirs.
There was so much more to rant about, but this is already quite long.
The pain of Windows phone development was significantly worse especially when you consider they kept on changing it every year because of their inferior development environment and tooling.
>Starting with Eclipse, then rebooting the whole development environment just because some management guys happened to be InteliJ users.
Google switched IDE's. Microsoft changed their development environment and tooling each time they decided to osbourne their still born OS.
>NDK is treated as a 20% project, done by an handfull of engineers.
Well, at least they stuck with it instead of chucking it to the curb each year and starting over.
>Devs were left in the cold when the migration away from Eclipse was decided. It was only due to the coincidence of Clion being developed, that Studio eventually got C++ support.
Isn't being left in the cold an annual event for Windows phone developers?
>The decision to use Gradle has made "how to optimize builds" a recorrent topic in any major Android conference.
This is in contrast to the Windows phone .build conference where there were no sessions because no one was building Windows phone apps.
>Google teams like Android development build tools so much that they rather use blaze, throwing yet another build tool into the mix.
Isn't choice good.
>There isn't a single release of Android Studio or the Support Library, that isn't followed by bug related complaints on online forums, despite being several weeks, months, in testing phase.
Because XCode and Visual Studio are bug free when new versions are released, right? Oh wait.
>Their initial emulator implementations was so lousy, that it required the public shame of Genymotion and Microsoft doing a better job for Google actually improving theirs.
Google has to support 3 platforms unlike Microsoft who couldn't even support 1.
Vastly superior to Android Studio.
> Google switched IDE's. Microsoft changed their development environment and tooling each time they decided to osbourne their still born OS.
Google replaces Android Studio plugins at each major release.
Profilers, Gradle configurations, IDE plugins
> Well, at least they stuck with it instead of chucking it to the curb each year and starting over.
It already started over 4 times, with incompatible build systems.
> Isn't being left in the cold an annual event for Windows phone developers?
Not as much as at Google IO. Oh sorry, maybe you are right we don't feel the cold as we are taking care of our sun burns.
> This is in contrast to the Windows phone .build conference where there were no sessions because no one was building Windows phone apps.
There is no such thing as Windows Phone specific conference, there is only BUILD conference, Connect conference and Windows Developer days.
> Isn't choice good.
Not when it increases development costs.
> Because XCode and Visual Studio are bug free when new versions are released, right? Oh wait.
Android Studio wins in bug counts.
> Google has to support 3 platforms unlike Microsoft who couldn't even support 1.
Strangely, you cleverly forgot to mention Genymotion.
As for Microsoft their Android Emulator still runs better than Google's on Windows.
Maybe Google needs to do less inverted balanced tree whiteboard interview exercises and more OS related stuff.
Last time I installed Visual Studio that pig sprayed 30 GB of garbage all over my SSD.
>Google replaces Android Studio plugins at each major release.
It's how the IDE is updated with new features. It also doesn't need third party plugins, like Resharper, to actually make it useful.
>It already started over 4 times, with incompatible build systems.
How many build systems did Windows phone have again? Be sure to factor in the Silverlight clusterfuck.
>Not as much as at Google IO. Oh sorry, maybe you are right we don't feel the cold as we are taking care of our sun burns.
At least they have sunny weather as opposed to depressing weather followed by depressing keynotes. Hey, let's open with a 2 hour Azure demo. Did people actually pay to go to this?
>There is no such thing as Windows Phone specific conference, there is only BUILD conference, Connect conference and Windows Developer days.
Which is why I specified Build.
>Android Studio wins in bug counts.
I'll take that bet any day. I've used Xcode and it has its fair share of bugs. As for VS, when you're spraying 30GB of files your bound to have a clusterfuck of bugs.
>Strangely, you cleverly forgot to mention Genymotion.
Really? Do they also make an IDE for all 3 platforms?
>As for Microsoft their Android Emulator still runs better than Google's on Windows.
No it doesn't. It's not even comparable. Perhaps you should install the Android Emulator one of these days and compare them. In fact, I'm not even sure the Microsoft Emulator even works anymore. Do they even update it?
>Maybe Google needs to do less inverted balanced tree whiteboard interview exercises and more OS related stuff.
They have Android, Chrome OS and Fuschsia so they seem to be doing well on the OS front. As for Windows, you better hope Microsoft is prepared for the release of a free, modern, real time microkernel OS with a capabilities based security model.
Resharper?! No thanks, I want my Visual Studio to actually work.
When I want to try to take off with my laptop I start Android Studio instead.
Your lack your knowledge about Genymotion supported platforms shows again that you never developed for Android.
You mean installing the emulator created after the public shame from Genymotion and Microsoft?
As someone with actual Android developing experience, I execute it quite often, thank you very much for the suggestion.
Chrome OS, with a market restricted to US schools, ignored everywhere else.
Fuchsia, an OS that is yet to move beyond alpha stage.
Yeah, very successful indeed.
My current install size is 12 GB. As for Visual Studio, when it came time to uninstall that pig of a development environment I actually had to go to Programs and Features and manually uninstall over 30-40 apps.
>Resharper?! No thanks, I want my Visual Studio to actually work.
30 plus GB's of data and they still need plugins to make it useful.
>When I want to try to take off with my laptop I start Android Studio instead.
You should really try and invest in an SSD. Android Studio launches in 8 seconds for me. Not that you actually use AS or would actually know.
>Your lack your knowledge about Genymotion supported platforms shows again that you never developed for Android.
On the contrary, the ignorance you've embarrassingly displayed shows you're either incompetent or have never used the platform.
>You mean installing the emulator created after the public shame from Genymotion and Microsoft?
Public shame is having to use Silverlight, a Flash rip off much like C# was a Java ripoff, to write Windows phone apps.
>As someone with actual Android developing experience, I execute it quite often, thank you very much for the suggestion.
I very much doubt that.
>Chrome OS, with a market restricted to US schools, ignored everywhere else.
Chrome OS decimated Microsoft in education and they'll do so elsewhere once they branch out.
>Fuchsia, an OS that is yet to move beyond alpha stage.
Reminds me of the time Microsoft said they weren't worried about Android. It's going to be nice watching Google destroy another one of their revenue streams.
Manufacturers can do mostly what they want without any downsides so at the end you just end up with ROMs similar in quality to WinXP themes. The Android APIs themselves are just layer and layer of hacks and inconsistencies on top of each other which is the main reason why most of the Android apps look so ugly in the first place.
No they can't. They need to pass the CTS and VTS.
>so at the end you just end up with ROMs similar in quality to WinXP themes.
When was the last time you saw an Android phone? 2008? Name those WinXP themed OEM skins.
>The Android APIs themselves are just layer and layer of hacks and inconsistencies on top of each other
Considering all of the bugs and security issues iOS has had I would have to give that award to iOS.
>which is the main reason why most of the Android apps look so ugly in the first place.
Not only do Android apps look better, but they also take up considerably less space than their bloated iOS counterparts.
Well then, the CTS and VTS are so weak they are useless then.
> When was the last time you saw an Android phone? 2008? Name those WinXP themed OEM skins.
Have you worked with Samsung or a no-name Chinese brand? There's plenty of errors arising from bad ROMs customising low-level stuff they should not do.
> Considering all of the bugs and security issues iOS has had I would have to give that award to iOS.
At least iOS fixes them and they can update their devices.
> Not only do Android apps look better, but they also take up considerably less space than their bloated iOS counterparts.
That's only for the top-notch part of the Store, the rest is just a dimension below iOS in term of usability (and I say this using only Android). The reason being that you need more dev time to have the same result on Android compared to iOS.
No they're not as they enforce and verify Android compatibility.
>Have you worked with Samsung or a no-name Chinese brand? There's plenty of errors arising from bad ROMs customising low-level stuff they should not do.
Yes, and there is no WinXP theme resemblance. So, once again, where are the links to these Android Phones with WinXP like themes?
>At least iOS fixes them and they can update their devices.
So does Google with 3 years of OS and security updates for their Pixel phones.
>That's only for the top-notch part of the Store, the rest is just a dimension below iOS in term of usability (and I say this using only Android). The reason being that you need more dev time to have the same result on Android compared to iOS.
The problem with iOS apps is that the top apps seem to think their a special snowflake and that they must develop their own UI and UX to differentiate themselves. The end result is an app that doesn't follow Apple's Human Interface Design guidelines and looks and navigates completely different from every other app. And then there's the garbage apps that are blown up on an iPad because Apple didn't understand Pixel density independence.
Which so much Android love I am curious to see how many apps you have released, since you seem to like the experience so much.
Have you forgotten to write Microsoft as M$?
Not to mention that to develop an app they required you to have Hyper-V, which is only available in Pro editions of Windows and CPUs with VT-x.
Hyper-V and so on, i certainly do not remember as I had them anyway, but talking about purely the dev env and ease of platform to me tells it all.
Android has not been written from "application dev" pov. With all these contexts, application contexts, leaky abstractions all over, it certainly is not a robust platform.
For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth. The tile interface worked well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used (even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft, not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android.
As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0] which Google also shut down.
Makes you wonder what would happen if Google pulled all of their iOS apps tomorrow, and then blocked third parties/diminished the mobile browser experience on purpose.
[0] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-...