But they didn’t. There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.

Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.

Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions would work fine.

> ... even if the full versions would work fine

That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.

Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]

It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-phone-8-1-fe...

[1] http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24422_Thestate...

I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the minimal versions of the websites which had poor experiences.

> There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.

No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.

Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.

> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.

Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.

I think it never broke past 5% of smart phone market. If this was a reason, I never heard. I feel like most people just were interested in something else and never even really considered it as an alternative.

"Why is Google blocking Windows Phone's YouTube app?"

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474516/why-is-google-...

No doubt the did it, I just don’t think it’s the primary reason windows phone fails to get penetration as that link says;

> Windows Phone's Achilles Heel is its app gap -- it has far fewer apps than Android and iOS

This was more of an issue than one specific app, especially one that like YT that can be consumed via web browser

I’m just speaking based on intuition and what I remember happening, I might be wrong