They killed it just before it had a chance to start becoming a hit. I only found out that it was actually awesome and very extensible just as they were killing it. And I'm both switched on and core market for the development side.

Shame.

This is Microsoft's problem with just about everything they've done consumer-side. Windows 10 Mobile is still a fantastic platform that was well ahead of it's time (Android Q is rumored to add both dark mode and a desktop UI, which W10M has had for years), and was killed just big selling points like Continuum were ramping up. And Universal Windows Platform has been harshly deprioritized in favor of Electron despite the fact that we're still a year from Windows 7 (the primary compelling reason to use Electron over UWP for a PC app) going away. Edge's rendering engine performs better than Chrome, but just as it's starting to reach basic feature parity and stability, Microsoft is axing it in favor of switching to Chromium.

Microsoft also seemed to be leading the foldable device trend both with the Courier several years ago, and more recently, the Surface Andromeda, but then inexplicably decided to kill them both and wait for their competitors to beat them to it. I have a Windows phone that runs Android apps as well as Android does but Microsoft decided to scrap the feature. Watching Microsoft both come up with the best solution to a problem and then brutally murder it before anyone can use it is probably the most painful thing to watch in tech.

As someone that has spend a big time of my development projects on Microsoft platforms, I tend to think all those issues are side effects from internal politics.

Just when team X is about to score, they end up loosing management support, thus the product gets canned while others pick up the idea.

I agree. And the problem is, each time this cycle happens, the company burns any consumer goodwill it's worked to achieve. (You see the same frantic, uncommitted stance to products with new Google initiatives these days.)

It's easy to see and say "this product is costing us money and isn't popular enough", and fail to realize "killing products over and over means people aren't going to try our next one". Long term stable support of a product line, even if it's not a top seller, is what's going to earn you consumer trust.

Foldable is still alive in Microsoft.

Sure, but they missed their window to launch a new product category, and will be trying to compete with Android and its giant app library on day one.

Android is not having that much luck on anything besides phones, tablets are being slowly eaten by detachable laptops with good old Windows on them.

At least that is what I observe from the local dealers around my me.

So from that point of view Win32/UWP is also a giant app library.