Still the best mobile device I've ever owned.
Tech Bloggers couldn't stand that a startup would launch on Apple (not even Android) and they couldn't download them and write about them. They made a lot of noise about this. But it was always nonsense.
MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously.
You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.
That’s not true; I developed a WP7 Silverlight app that worked with just minor bugfixes through Windows Mobile 10.
What they did do was bungle the marketing on it, so the public conciousness mixed up “WP7 devices can’t run WP8 apps” and “WP8 devices can’t run WP7 apps”.
WP7 itself was a throwing away of compatability with Windows Mobile apps; reportedly, that loss of goodwill is why Google refused to support the platform. WM6.5 apps would have been out of place on WP7, but if Microsoft was still yelling about developers x3, maybe they would have made that transition possible --- require a new frontend for cohesive UX, but allow for core libraries from older apps to run as-is, instead of forcing the new apis.
The loss of compatibility wasn't even the biggest issue here - it was the loss of functionality. WM6.5 had a huge enterprise feature set, only rivaled by Blackberry (and probably Nokia to an extent). Then came WP7 and had...literally nothing. They didn't even support Exchange ActiveSync in the beginning.
This was enough for a not insignificant number of devs to drop out of the already small market and lower the already limited app supply even more.
I like to think that WP7 was a smart dumb phone. I had a great UI, that I loved. And just enough smart stuff to make me happy. Maps. Unified messaging. Cortana wasnt completely enshittified yet either. Small package (L520) and I loved it.
WP8 tried to incorporate Windows 8 design features, and everything got worse. Vendors pulled out of the unified messaging. Cortana would send my maps to the advertisers address rather than closest requested. And the L525 that ran it actually went backwards in specs.
I would still, today, go back to a supported, bugfixed, WP7 in a heartbeat. And I bet there are dozens! of people just like me.
I also upgraded to Lumia 550 as my Windows Mobile 10 device and it wasn't bad either though the platform was close to its demise by that time. I eventually gave it to my Dad and got a Galaxy J7 in exchange which became my entry point to Android world.
In the 2020s every serious app developer from Epic to Spotify to Facebook to Tinder is desperately concerned by the platform policies of Apple/Google, and would gladly support Windows phone as first class platform. And so would consumers - enterprises would love to have their AD groups work neatly on employee devices and many individual buyers would love to have more open freedom too.
Absolutely right.
It gave up too early.
And Mozilla gave up on B2G too early. KaiOS has been quite a big hit and it's still making money. In time, the hardware came down to meet the requirements of what wasn't a really lightweight OS when it was launched in 2013 or so.
WP7 and WP8 weren't amazing (although three of us liked it), but they offered tremendous value on the low end. You could get a $100 WP8 phone that was more responsive than a $250 Android phone. Microsoft was telling people that most WP8 devices would be upgradable to WM10, then they removed low memory devices from the list, then they released WM10 in such a state that upgrading anything was a bad idea.
In particular, (trident) Edge was so awful, it was almost unusable. Mobile IE had a terrible rendering engine, but at least the UI was responsive. Edge queued inputs, so when a page was busy loading, it wouldn't respond to the back or stop buttons or navigating to a new page until the page finished loading... Not sure what the stop button is there for when it waits to stop until after everything is done.
When you are driving developers away by launching a different development model every release, users are going to be driven to the browser, and if it sucks too, what are they going to do?
WM10 had Continuum for high end phones which is neat, but it neglected the low end market where WP7 and WP8 shone.
It wasn't until the final build of WM10 that they got performance to be good on my test phone. (Edge still sucked) But that was way too late. They needed to have WM10 come out of the gate as good or better than WP8. AFAIK, WM10 never got bigger installed base numbers compared to WP8 even though many WP8 devices were upgradable to WM10.
Perhaps moving phones into the overall Windows org wasn't the right choice for the product. Almost certainly eliminating dedicated Test engineers reduced the quality of the product.
In an alternate reality where Microsoft provided a usable WM10 base install, tested and fixed WP8 -> WM10 upgrades before release so apps didn't fail on upgrade, had an option of a reasonable browser (letting android or chrome into the store or at least offering the old mobile ie), things would have been a lot better. If Intel hadn't pulled the plug on Atom for phones days before the Continuum demo, it might have been buy a high end x86 Windows Phone and run win32 apps on it when you're at your desk... Maybe WM10 would have still failed, but it would have put up a good fight.
But I tend to share the view that WP was, with the Nokia WP8 devices, finally getting somewhere. The fact not everything had to go through Silverlight to get on the screen was a big help!
There was a lot of noise in the industry back in that era that suggested this whole fight was far more intense and nastier than many would imagine (and I have to be careful to not be any more specific than that), but ultimately I believe Android only reached an acceptable state because of the need to defend from iOS and Windows Phone/RT.
I think the average non-technical user uses a whole lot more apps than what you give them "credit" for. The technology industry has pushed for more and more everyday services to be app-based. And most of these apps work only on iOS and Android.
From the perspective of a European carrier back in the day: This would probably have been true in the early iOS/Android days, but by then we were wayy in the "There's an app for that" era. All metrics we had back then showed potential app availability being the tie-breaker and the "WP has no apps" perception the biggest reason for consumers to avoid it.
And conversely, to have apps you need developer buy-in, and to get that you need to demonstrate potential for wide adoption or be so intriguing that devs want to build for your platform regardless.
This is where starting low-end hurt. As noted by others, this made it difficult for Firefox OS to perform well in users’ hands, but additionally the users willing to take a risk on a new platform generally aren’t usually the ones who are interested in low-end hardware. People buying cheap phones primarily want a high value proven workhorses, and anything running an experimental OS is the opposite of that.
As a result, buzz around the project was minimal and quickly dissipated. Devs weren’t excited about it and didn’t talk about it and thus didn’t develop for it.
I was at Mozilla during this time, and I remember a huge blocker was WhatsApp. They were not interested in porting, but at the time it was essentially the killer app in the same emerging markets that Firefox OS was targeting.
If the web client would have existed back then it might have helped
They didn't need to and couldn't have expected to. The real problem was that to get to a successful product, you needed to be willing to lose money for a long time. Android and iPhone were years ahead in terms of polish and optimization, and were not exactly sitting still. Firefox OS was going to be bad for a long time before it could ever be good, and did not have the luxury of its competitors being in the same state any longer (people don't remember how bad Android used to be). These are necessary growing pains for any incredibly complex system: mythical-man-month stuff that should be familiar to anyone in software development.
At the time, Mozilla had just renegotiated their search deal for $900 million over 3 years [0], with guaranteed payments that did not depend on actual search traffic. That was a lot more money than the project had ever seen before, and meant there was a limited window in which Mozilla could neglect the desktop browser in the hopes that the mobile OS would take off. In hindsight it proved to be too limited.
When Firefox OS was finally killed, management told us [1] something along the lines of, "The growth expectations we had going in to the project turned out to be unrealistic." I think it is okay to stop doing something when it is not working. This is just the inverse of Charlie Munger's advice to, "Figure out what works and do it." One wonders what could have been done with more realistic expectations, though.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/12/firef...
[1] I was also there, although outside of fixing a few media-handling bugs, I never worked on B2G directly.
That said I think Mozilla were right to try. The phone ecosystem we live in today is locked down and tightly controlled by tech giants. Leveraging web tech to bridge that gap made sense, even if it had drawbacks. But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off.