Exactly. Years ago the number of apps in each app store was portrayed as "more is better" and a moat against new platforms. But realistically, how many apps does the average mobile user actually use, now that the novelty has worn off? I would guess that 75% of all users actually care about maybe 50 different apps combined, like Facebook, Netflix, WhatsApp, Spotify, etc.

It's been said many times that Microsoft could've won the mobile wars by simply taking a billion dollars, and paying the companies with the top 100 apps in the Apple app store to port their apps to Windows Mobile. That's $10 million each.

Instead, they spent billions and billions of dollars trying to attract developers to their platform before eventually shuttering it.

There was a phone with awesome hardware, an awesome mobile-first operating system, and practically no apps. Bill admitted his biggest mistake was being too preoccupied with the antitrust activity in Europe, and missing the shift to mobile computing cost him ~400 billion.

I agree with this so strongly I was about to write the same and have held the theory a long time. I wonder if there is a data set out there to show 95% of the world population has substantially similar apps installed and the ones they care about enough to consider a deal breaker are even fewer and less diverse. I don't think MS would even have had to spend that much.

I'm sure many would be reluctant to trust m$ as a 3rd party in the mobile phone stakes, particularly with their telemetry, which is the root of the cancer plaguing the existing platforms (including desktop) already.

Most people aren’t using $ in words like Msft. Most likely find that weird. Same with caring about telemetry if they even know its definition. This is not even getting into not caring about all of this enough to call stuff “cancer”

Microsoft does jackshit of a telemetry compared to Big Google.

Google seems like they have lost a lot of their Android enthusiasm. I could see them making a deal with Microsoft for Android.

Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads and search? Maybe cloud services? I would be afraid to use anything but open source tools on their cloud service given the kill rate they have for products...

> Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads and search?

Does google have enthusiasm for anything anymore other than ads?

Fixed that for you. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31094407.