> removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones

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”.

Ah, you’re right… but if I recall a lot of apps (if they weren’t abandoned) were WP8 only releases. The platform felt very dead, very quickly.

I mean, it was more than marketing. It was hard to build an app that would use WP8 features on WP8 but also run on WP7. If you kept building for WP7, the WP8 features were unavailable; you'd end up with maybe a shared core and a WP7 app plus a WP8 app, and then WP8.1 did the same kind of thing, and finally WM10 let you build "universal" apps which would only run on WM10, which never managed to get an current install count more than WP8, and might not have managed to surpass WP7 either.

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.

>WP7 itself was a throwing away of compatability with Windows Mobile apps;

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.

The issue was that you had to publish and maintain separate versions of your app for WP8 and WP7 as soon as you wanted to use the new SDK, with no way to just specify API level or feature flags.

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 think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling.

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.

Lumia 520 was my first smartphone and I really liked it's polycarbonate back design. IIRC, it was based on WP 8 though but wasn't upgradeable to 10 (like most devices). I liked stuff like tiles and it's camera though it had its limitations (couldn't playback mkv files for eg without a paid third party app; this was fixed in WP 10).

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.