
I miss Windows Phone - Ducki
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/7/17206174/microsoft-windows-phone-influence-editorial
======
Someone1234
I purchased a $30 Windows Phone well after the platform was dead, I just
wanted to experience it before it was gone.

For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth. The tile interface worked
well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on
icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used
(even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft,
not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android.

As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part
because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate
the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled
to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0]
which Google also shut down.

Makes you wonder what would happen if Google pulled all of their iOS apps
tomorrow, and then blocked third parties/diminished the mobile browser
experience on purpose.

[0] [https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-
kill-...](https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-your-
youtube-app-immediately/)

~~~
bko
From the article cited regarding the YouTube app developed by Microsoft:

> The problems with that, according to Google, are three: the app enables
> users to download YouTube videos, prevents ads from being shown, and plays
> videos whose owners have set to only play on certain platforms. Microsoft’s
> app, Google says, violates the YouTube terms of service, and uses the
> YouTube logo in a way that contravenes the company’s branding guidelines.

Is this just an excuse used by Google, or did they really have these features?
Because I could understand why Google doesn't want a service to demonitize
their service. Why wouldn't Microsoft just remove those features? It seems
like a reasonable response.

~~~
prepend
Since it would be trivial for Goog to expose all of this functionality in
their API, I consider all of this BS PR by google.

It would also be trivial for google to make a basic app for the 3rd biggest
phone OS.

But since Google makes an OS and doesn’t want other OSes, any actions they
have other than support are suspect.

It’s like when MS said that it was possible for PC sellers to not bundle IE.
Sure it’s possible, but it was just BS because it was completely MS’
prerogative.

~~~
d6de964
Can somebody breakdown which companies are on each side of this corporate war?
Is it Microsoft + Facebook vs Google + Apple?

~~~
fencepost
Why do you treat this as only having two sides?

In the "Platform" battlefields you have Microsoft, Apple and Google fighting
for the end-users. On the infrastructure side Amazon is also making a play
here with all of the AWS options and Google and Microsoft are also fighting
there.

In the "Social" battlefield, you have Facebook, with Microsoft+LinkedIn+Xbox
carving out some niches and Google flailing wildly at everything.

In the "Creepy Stalkering" battlefield (which overlaps some with Social) you
have Facebook getting people to give up data and Google just silently watching
.everything.you.do. _muahahahaha_. Facebook also watches as much as possible
via website badges and sharing, but doesn't have near the reach of Google with
searches + Analytics.

I'm sure there are other battlefields I'm not listing here including things
like overlap into the offline world ("Political Influence" anyone?), but it's
far from just a 2-sided battle.

------
manaskarekar
Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia 920 was by far the best phone I have ever used.

My friends look at me funny when I say that.

There were so many things they did right. Some random things off the top of my
head:

\- Internet Explorer had the address bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't
get how nobody else does this.

\- The tiles work really very well (big one). The usability of shortcuts +
active information + dense layout on your homescreen.

\- The back-button behavior was perfect. It made sense.

\- Very snappy response throughout.

\- Lots of pros on the hardware of the Lumia 920 itself but that's a different
story.

\- Best keyboard/swipe setup.

\- Lots of thoughtful design elements.

There's all kinds of stuff that was a joy.

I tried Windows Phone 10.1 Dev release and that was horrible.

I do wish Windows Phone continued to live though.

~~~
solarkraft
New mobile chrome has the controls on the bottom. It's dumb. I'm using Firefox
now.

~~~
Klathmon
It was an option, and they already reverted it because of backlash.

~~~
manaskarekar
I'm curious, why would there be backlash against something that's optional?

They could leave the default as the least offensive option.

~~~
Klathmon
Because if the benefit of the code being there isn't worth the maintenance
effort required to secure, maintain, and develop it further, then it's removed
in chrome.

~~~
manaskarekar
In general, that's the sane argument against feature bloat.

In this instance, is the effort required to maintain a layout option really
that much more? I don't know the answer, it's a genuine question.

Also, was there no benefit? I didn't even realize the feature existed because
I searched for it before it was introduced and moved to Firefox.

I know nothing about the history of this feature in Chrome, but from 10000
feet, this looks like a heavy handed move to remove a feature instead of
making it optional, especially in the times of large + tall touchscreens.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, there may be, and probably
are some good reasons for these.

~~~
Klathmon
It's clearly a "controversial" decision by the Chrome team, but IIRC they have
a fairly strict rule about "options", so they seem to like to err on the side
of "less options" in most cases.

But in terms of the "cost" of something like this. When you run at Chrome's
scale, it can be quite a bit. From documentation, help articles, UI team costs
(okay now we need to make sure all UI changes look good and work well in both
configurations), development costs (when 1% of your users represent over 10
million people, there is a WIDE configuration of devices it runs on), and
testing cost (either automated or manual, it scales VERY poorly with the
number of options as possible permutations required to fully test it goes up
at an insane rate).

At a certain scale, the better option (at least in my opinion) is to "choose"
for the user if you are fairly confident that the extreme majority will be
happy with it, doubly so if the default option doesn't "break" anything for
most.

------
niftich
Many aspects of Windows Phone were thoughtfully designed, but they waded into
a market where customers expected to install arbitrary apps.

There were some high-profile holdouts like Snapchat, whose lack hurt the phone
(or hurt retention) among the valuable, younger demographics, while everyone
else has been conditioned to be used to a zillion single-use apps, from their
bank, their fast-casual restaurant, to throwaway games and random tools that
try to imbue phones with some productivity utility.

A platform with a low market share and confusing (and ever-changing) developer
story couldn't compete in this market, even if they kept putting out decent
hardware for not a lot of money.

They could have reframed the expectations, and marketed it as a business OS,
but with a rapidly declining BlackBerry, they didn't want to pursue what
seemed like a failing niche. Or, they could have not screwed up Desktop
Windows' app story so much, which exacerbated the issues with developing for
Windows Phone.

Or they could have arrived at the market several years later, when Progressive
Web Apps graduate from wishful thinking tech demos to a viable way of
authoring software to be distributed over either URLs or app stores. This is
the future that Google wants, their medusa-like competitor who tries to
balance their desire to preserve and gatekeep the Open Web with their large
install-base of Android phones running apps written in quasi-Java that they
got sued over.

Windows Phone was a technically sound product positioned awkwardly, and they
couldn't persuade enough third-parties to deliver on the expectations that
customers expected. But they neither doubled down, nor did an immediate
reversal (e.g. Surface RT), so in typical Microsoft fashion they let it flail
around for years without any strong messaging to reassure users (remember this
from Silverlight? Zune? XNA?).

~~~
userbinator
_but they waded into a market where customers expected to install arbitrary
apps._

Of course. The locked-down nature of the platform was a big turn-off for me
too, since branding it Windows made everyone expect it would be more like
desktop Windows with a different UI.

------
system16
I used Windows Phone for several years. It was a refreshing take on a mobile
OS, and to this day I still think it had the best touch keyboard with the most
satisfying tapping sound effects.

When I finally did put it out to pasture, it was a breath of fresh air though;
I really had no idea how much I'd been missing out on in terms of apps and
features on iOS/Android, and how many Windows Phone irritations/limitations
I'd just been putting up with.

That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new
ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and
photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows
Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market.

~~~
ipsi
> That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new
> ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and
> photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows
> Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market.

I don't think so. While there's definitely some level of "App Fatigue",
there's a lot of apps that users would _never_ give up. e.g., WhatsApp,
Facebook (& Messenger), Snapchat, CityMapper, Google Maps, any banking apps,
just to name a few big names that would be used day-to-day. And then there's a
_lot_ of miscellaneous apps that I don't use regularly, but do use
occasionally, like all the airline ones, or food delivery, or Trainline, or
Taxi apps, etc.

The transport ones are notable because they make it really easy to add the
ticket or boarding pass to the iOS Wallet, which means I have offline access
to them (very important when travelling).

I think most users have found the subset of apps they _really_ want, and don't
have a pressing need to look for more, yes. However, the apps they do have,
they would definitely miss if they were gone.

Now, a lot of those apps might not be necessary if the mobile web site
integrated with the OS well enough (mostly notifications, mic/webcam access,
Apple/Google pay equivalent, responsiveness), though some probably wouldn't.
WhatsApp is a good example here - all the content is stored _locally_ , on the
phone. Making it a mobile website as the _default_ option would go against
what they are trying to offer (Signal is the same, I believe?).

But since none of the existing platforms offer full integration like that
(AFAIK), there would probably have to be some extra work building out those
features on the mobile site. And I guess that brings us full circle back to
the "no one builds anything for Platform X because it has no users" problem?

~~~
robocat
I think I only use a few apps, yet whenever I look at the open-app history on
my Android, I am always surprised at the sheer number of apps I have used
recently.

The long tail of uncommonly used apps do matter e.g. a bus tracking app I only
use when visiting my brother (in another city).

------
gdilla
Not widely known - MSFT was throwing around cash at developers and brands to
make apps for windows phone. Even providing developer shops to code it.

MSFT handed us a check and a dev shop to pay with it. We designed the app in
their ui paradigm and had fun doing it. Had enough money left over to take the
team out for a fancy dinner when it was all done.

~~~
Ologn
They did this later on.

In 2011, Android Market (Google play) cost $25 for a lifetime developer
account. You could develop apps on Windows, Mac or Linux. It came with an
emulator. So for the cost of $25, anyone on any major developer platform could
write an app.

In 2011, you could only program Windows Phone app on Windows (I don't even
have a Windows machine where I live). Windows Phone Marketplace charged $99 a
year for a developer account. You can say Apple did this to, or that it should
be nothing, but apparently it was not a winning strategy. I know a college
student who shelled out the $25 back then and published an app on Google Play,
now he works as an Android developer for a Fortune 500 company. Perhaps the
idea paying four times that, and on a yearly basis no less, to Microsoft, was
off-putting. People can straighten their tie and say any business going off on
such a venture can afford $100 a year as a gatekeeper, but it didn't work out
so well for Microsoft. Apple was already in the pole position so they could
get away with it.

But you're right, after throwing up these barriers to developer entry at
first, they started raining cash on developers to make apps, providing
developer shops to code it and so on.

~~~
scarface74
I doubt that many developers saw having a Windows machine as an impediment to
building apps. Microsoft does still have 90% market share in PCs.

~~~
jhasse
What's the marketshare on developer machines though? And build servers? What
about Docker?

It's so nice to be able to have any CI build your Android apps and Travis CI
supports building iOS apps, too.

~~~
pjmlp
Pretty much the same regarding developer machines.

Besides my stay at research institutes, I never worked on companies where IT
allowed anything other than Windows as development machines.

Linux when required is only VM based or servers accessed via ssh.

Macs are only allowed on macOS/iOS related projects.

Docker remains a buzzword for the majority of customers, another box to tick
besides big data and ML on slideware.

~~~
scarface74
I wouldn't go that far. I often see cited that 60%+ Of commits on Github come
from Macs.

~~~
pjmlp
Github is a very lousy metric to measure anything relevant to typical
enterprise development.

~~~
scarface74
Even modern "Enterprise Development" is mostly web based. Few companies these
days are developing WinForm apps.

~~~
pjmlp
So what, we are doing it on Windows laptops and no one is ever allowed to
touch Github beyond getting stuff out of there to spare money on licenses.

So no, Githib is not a metric for enterprise development.

And you are right Winforms is legacy, all modern Windows applications are
written in WPF.

I have been doing it the last 4 years, and dispite the HN Web bubble, out
there in the enterprise there are companies actually adopting UWP and
migrating their laptop fleet to Windows 10.

~~~
scarface74
It's not about the "HN Web Bubble". I'm on the opposite coast and keep my eye
on the job market. There are relatively few jobs for WPF compared to web -
even in the enterprise market. Most internal apps these days are web based
because of ease of deployment, and TCO. No one wants to maintain a bunch of
PCs with the only alternative being a bunch of Citrix Terminals when they can
use a web browser.

The writing is on the wall - not even MS is falling over itself to support WPF
in .Net Core.

~~~
pjmlp
So come to Europe. Plenty of WPF jobs here.

Not everyone is using Citrix, and there are many markets, like life sciences,
ticketing systems, factory management and many other domains, using non
networked devices with native UIs in WPF.

Of course MS is not supporting WPF on .NET Core, they already announced XAML
Standard and Xamarin.Forms is going to support Linux and macOS as well.

Also they have big UI announcement planned for BUILD as discussed on .NET
Rocks interview with Scott Hunter.

------
bcoates
Still using a Windows Phone (Nokia 1020) as my main phone.

It's mostly the Nokia parts that I really love, like the transit app, and the
fact that it's user-serviceable with minimal tools.

The app ecosystem is actually less of a problem as time goes on; now that
Apple and Google ship reasonable browsers in their phones most services I want
to use have good mobile web experiences. The real essentials like Pandora /
Kindle / WhatsApp are available and still work.

The big pain point for me is Slack's web client, which appears to be
gratuitously broken on phones.

~~~
mattnewport
I use Slack's Windows Phone app on my HP Elite x3. It has some issues but it's
functional enough for when I need to use Slack away from my PC.

~~~
bcoates
I swear that wasn't in the store when I looked earlier. Updated this year and
everything!

Cunningham's Law in action I suppose.

------
philliphaydon
My Lumia 925 is still the best phone I’ve ever owned. But MS killed itnfor
themselves.

Windows Phones were kinda big in Asia. Used to see lots of people in
Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, with them all the time. But the high end phones
never came to these markets. People I worked with wanted all the new phones
but MS didn’t release them in Singapore for over 12 months. People gave up and
went android and iOS.

I went Android then iOS. There’s a lot I miss about windows phone. And Poki is
still hands down the best pocket reader app.

~~~
detaro
I thought here in Germany they also were making respectable inroads (although
that might be distorted since the brightly-colored Lumnias were so noticable),
but then they let it languish at a point where they would have needed to
double down on having up-to-date and interesting devices around. Most people
aren't buying new phones every year, so getting market share will mean
sticking around for at least a few cycles. Apparently MS didn't think that'd
work out in enough markets?

~~~
pjmlp
They were, at a given point it was quite common to see them while commuting.

A few of our customers also had them as official device for their regular
employees.

~~~
keithpeter
UK: 'jack the lads' used to have lumina phones - the ones that you could get
for £100 or that came with contracts. I used to see those a lot outside the
local football ground. The central messaging queue seemed popular and video
watching &c.

Then they disappeared to be replaced by huge Samsungs.

------
snomad
I feel like Microsoft has a string of devices which could have been good to
great, and they keep just missing the mark somehow - windows phone, ms band,
surface hub, heck even zune was as good as an ipod at a lower price point.

Not sure why they keep dropping the ball, lack of focus? Not willing to stay
the course? I get dropping zune as the market had moved on, but band was
getting good reviews when they dropped it and wearables are still growing. And
for the life of me I don't understand why they don't have a motto of a hub in
every college class - that device is so perfect for facilitating remote class
attendance.

~~~
Lasher
Zune HD really was a good player. I switched to it after 3 Ipod Nanos in a row
had trouble holding a charge about five minutes after the warranty period
expired. Cheaper price, longer battery life, better (imo) interface, just poor
marketing and hard to beat the Itunes Juggernaut. If you subscribed to the
$9.99 a month music service then downloading new music and syncing it to the
device was smooth and fast and easy in a way that Itunes _still_ hasn't
managed. Like you said, no idea why Microsoft keep creating great products but
then suck at selling and marketing them.

~~~
ams6110
Well it's a good illustration for anyone here: ideas and good software are
easy. Building a company that can successfully sell them is the hard part.

------
traspler
My only experience with Windows Phone was when I had to port a Cordova app
(made with AngularJS) to it. It was a really bad experience for me. The
terrible hacks to get the Angular app to even run in the webview on Windows
Phone 8.1 was shocking and the performance took a big hit. Bundling and
distributing a test version was so complicated without a huge enterprise setup
that it was simply not feasible. Windows Phone 10 improved all of that a lot
but there were still security hacks necessary for the app to even run. I can
only hope developers which created native apps had a better experience than I
did.

~~~
pavlov
It’s not really Windows Phone’s fault that Cordova and Angular are so
terrible.

~~~
robocat
Of course it is Microsoft's fault. They could have chosen to put resources
into making those projects work better on Windows Phone.

Microsoft made a bet on Xamarin instead.

Also you had to use their proprietary touch events in the webview browser,
which (a) was buggy, (b) had little information about how to use it in
practice, and (c) the webview was a branch of IE11 specific to Windows Phone.
I think for Update 1 the webview supported the Apple touch event API but it
was broken (disappeared in update 2).

The dumbest thing is that supporting Cordova properly would have immediately
got them a whole heap of lesser known apps without having to give money
directly to developers. Money multiplier investments are smart.

~~~
saagarjha
> Of course it is Microsoft's fault.

What? This makes no sense; why would Microsoft be at fault for supporting a
platform that makes demonstrably poorer apps? Doing that would just be
shooting themselves in the foot. Are Apple and Google at fault for not making
Cordova work well on their mobile platforms?

~~~
robocat
> why would Microsoft be at fault for supporting a platform that makes
> demonstrably poorer apps?

I have experience developing an app using a WebView, and I agree it is poor.
However, it is a good compromise if:

\- a team of one that has experience with HTML5. It is possible to develop an
app for Apple, Google, _and_ Windows Phone this way.

\- a web first, mobile second app

\- an app that is more about presenting information than entering data.

> Are Apple and Google at fault for not making Cordova work well on their
> mobile platforms?

Irrelevant: they are the incumbents not the chasers.

------
mattnewport
I'm still using Windows Phone - an HP Elite x3. I always preferred it to
Android but I've refused to use Apple products for many years and when I
decided I was done with Google products I went back to Windows Phone. I'm not
big on apps anyway and I've mostly found it a positive not being able to
succumb to the temptation to install time wasting or privacy hating apps. The
biggest inconvenience is not being able to use the app for one of our local
car sharing services but there is an app for car2go so I've just been using
them instead. The official LastPass app is really bad too but I get by with
it.

Not sure yet what I'm going to do for my next phone. I've backed the Purism
Librem 5 so holding out hope that will actually ship and be a usable option.
Biggest challenge for me there would likely be not having WhatsApp or Telegram
(Windows Phone still has both).

~~~
ocdtrekkie
In the same place. Love my Elite x3, will stay on it as long as security
updates keep coming every month. May end up having to suffer iOS if nothing
new comes out, but I'll never go back to Android. Definitely hope the Librem 5
works out, though have doubts that it will.

------
pjmlp
I love my Windows Phones, even ended up buying WP 10, when the upgrade from
8.1 wasn't possible.

My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed
up together.

The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more
responsive that Android devices on the same price category.

And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android
tools.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed
up together.

So they osbourned your previous phone and the current phone you have has an OS
in maintenance mode and isn't receiving OEM firmware updates.

>The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more
responsive that Android devices on the same price category

You realize that the high majority of Windows phone apps aren't written in C++
or .NET native, right?

>And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android
tools.

This is hilarious considering the number of times Microsoft osbourned the
Windows phone development environment.

~~~
pjmlp
Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust?

It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team.

To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill
customer expectations, it is a chaos.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust?

C#. Ever hear of it?

>It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team.

At least they're still employed. Windows support team - not so much.

>To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill
customer expectations, it is a chaos.

Compared to the Windows store, which is a cesspool of garbage, for both
Windows apps and Windows phone apps I would say quality was the furthest thing
from their minds.

~~~
pjmlp
> C#. Ever hear of it?

Yes, apparently it is part of .NET, go figure.

> At least they're still employed. Windows support team - not so much.

Well last time I checked my Windows Phones were still getting more updates
than my Android phones.

Quite ironic for a platform that is supposed to be dead with unemployed team

> Compared to the Windows store, which is a cesspool of garbage, for both
> Windows apps and Windows phone apps I would say quality was the furthest
> thing from their minds.

Not far off from the daily garbage I see on Play Store as well.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>Yes, apparently it is part of .NET, go figure.

It's also what most of the apps are written in, aren't they? Unlike C++ and
.NET Native.

>Well last time I checked my Windows Phones were still getting more updates
than my Android phones.

I'm pretty sure you're not getting firmware updates from the OEM since they
abandoned the platform so you only seem to be getting OS updates from
Microsoft - who announced they'll be ending updates.

>Quite ironic for a platform that is supposed to be dead with unemployed team

No firmware updates and your OS updates will be ending soon. That looks like
an unemployed team to me.

>Not far off from the daily garbage I see on Play Store as well.

The difference is the Play store actually contains all of the apps and they're
really nice to use. The Windows store, however, will always be a cesspool. I
hear Microsoft is so desperate for apps that their scouring the Internet for
PWA apps to put on their store.

~~~
pjmlp
Better take a compilers course to learn the differences between .NET and .NET
Native.

Interesting that you mention PWA, which happen to be pushed by Google's Chrome
team, which has some Google IO talks bashing native apps as if Android wasn't
made by the same company.

At the same time they are pushing Flutter and Dart as replacement for those
stacks.

What a cohesive company, go figure.

~~~
bitmapbrother
>Better take a compilers course to learn the differences between .NET and .NET
Native.

It would seem you're the one in need of a course due to your inability to
differentiate the difference between .NET and .NET Native.

>Interesting that you mention PWA, which happen to be pushed by Google's
Chrome team, which has some Google IO talks bashing native apps as if Android
wasn't made by the same company.

PWA is a platform for low end phones. It's funny that Microsoft jumped on the
bandwagon so fast. When you're that desperate for apps on your cesspool of a
store you'll take anything.

>At the same time they are pushing Flutter and Dart as replacement for those
stacks.

Flutter and Dart are a cross platform development solution. They're also
instrumental to Fuchsia - you know, the OS that'll make Windows suffer the
same fate as Windows Phone.

>What a cohesive company, go figure.

Speaking of cohesive, how was your annual re-org?

------
oDot
Sorry to hijack, but the real hero in much of the progress described in the
article and in mobile OS overall, is non other than Matias Duarte with webOS.
Innovation includes features such as Synergy, Just Type, gesture bar and the
card interface.

Highly suggest you watch the launch video from CES 2009:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw)

------
yantrams
I had a Nokia N9 that shipped with the ill fated Meego OS. Hands down the
smoothest operating system I've ever used on a mobile.

~~~
scooble
I agree. The buttonless swipable interface was a joy to use (not least because
it made it simple to distinguish between closing an app and putting it in the
background) and the single notification/feed homepage was fantastic. Features
like tap-to-wake and the glance screen felt so ahead of their time. I've not
really found another phone that has been as awesome, and I am still profoundly
depressed at how the phone was killed at birth.

~~~
u801e
I'm still using one now as my main phone. The only thing I don't like about it
is how you have to hold the on-screen camera button down to auto-focus before
taking a picture (making it difficult to do with one hand). Other than that,
I've had no issues with it.

~~~
8xde0wcNwpslOw
That's commitment. I loved my N9 about as much as anyone, but for me, the HW
just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but
perhaps then you wouldn't even need the interface.

Anyway, with faster internals, a sharper screen and an up-to-date browser, I
would choose Meego any day of the week. Shame it wasn't the case.

~~~
u801e
> Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but perhaps then you wouldn't even
> need the interface.

Well, it's still better than what Symbian provides (I also have an N8). As
long as I can browse and post to HN and reddit, use it for off-line GPS,
playing music, sms and phone calls, it works well enough for me. It even works
for tethering with a USB cable.

I suppose once the battery goes bad, I'll have to move on to something else :)

------
tbassetto
I had a Palm Pré and I miss webOS more than any mobile OS I have ever used.

~~~
wpietri
Ah, Palm. I had a few of their Treo series and loved them. In 2002 I had the
Internet on my phone! I had email! I had apps! The user experience was clunky
compared to what came later, but it was amazing for its day.

WebOS was a good try, but too little and too late. They had a 6-year lead on
Apple and they blew it. I happened to run across some former Palm people years
later and I was told that PalmOS had stacked up so much technical debt that
innovation was very slow.

It's funny how much people today believe that the iPhone was the first
smartphone.

~~~
beamatronic
Same here. I wanted to add that even in 2000 with a Handspring Visor PDA
running Palm OS you could sync with the Internet (news, maps, etc ) when it
was in the cradle attached to your pc. There was an app where you could
manually tell it your location (street intersection) and it would show you
restaurants near you. A coworker had a “Ricochet” cellular modem for his Palm
device and he would send emails from the Caltrain. This was in 1999-2000. For
me, we had versatile computers with apps in our pocket 18 years ago, the
difference now is high-bandwidth, cheap, ubiquitous wireless data everywhere
you go.

------
dylan-m
Microsoft and Nokia had a really good balance of software and hardware, and
it's still a unique contrast to what Google and Apple are doing. I really
liked their colourful cases (although the N9 did it best), and I'm still
envious of the dedicated shutter button. Why hasn't anyone else done this? It
makes way more sense than that goofy "press the volume button to take a
picture" hack that Android and iOS have been doing. For one thing, the shutter
button is actually on the right side of the phone. With the volume button,
they don't even know if it's at the edge. (It probably isn't). And they keep
coming up with these weird things like flicking your phone at the lock screen
to open the camera app. No, Google, just add a button.

~~~
ams6110
Heh wow I've had an Android phone for years and never knew the volume button
would take a picture. Who would have thought? But thanks -- that's better than
tapping the screen, which was the only way I knew until now.

~~~
dylan-m
Glad to help! It's better than nothing, yeah :b And if you have a newer phone
version of Android, you might be able to double press the Power button to open
the camera. In stock Android, there's a thing in Settings / System / Gestures
/ Jump to camera.

(Now, imagine if you could open the camera and take a picture _with the same
button._ Revolutionary! Someone should patent it).

------
joelhaasnoot
Windows Phone was fun to develop for (not). Especially their native C
compilation setup was a nightmare, we had to rewrite most of our code that
worked fine on Android and iOS to be ANSI C compatible so that the Visual C
6.0 compiler liked it enough.

~~~
futurix
I think you are confusing Windows Phone and ancient Windows Mobile.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
No, unfortunately, Windows Phone 7.1 and 8.0 had very limited support for
C/C++ libraries (native code). The support that it did have was based off old
compilers (maybe it was the only thing they had at the time for ARM
processors?). I believe 7.0 had no support for this.

~~~
Kipters
7.x (public) SDK had no support for C/C++ whatsoever, you needed special
access and a private SDK to use it. Windows Phone 8.0 allowed C++ 11

~~~
xorblurb
VS2012 (I guess this was the compiler, maybe it has been upgraded after) had a
quite limited support of C++ 11.

Only starting with VS2015 (and then maybe even update 2 IIRC) we had what we
can call C++ 11 (for the purpose of not having to port code for it, or such
port to be easy, so missing 1 or 2 language and library features can be OK,
but missing half of them: less so).

------
ryl00
Jumped on Windows phone back when Microsoft started throwing in the towel
(some of those sales were just too hard to resist). I know at some point I'll
need to leave (probably back to Android), but for now my Win 10m idol 4s is
holding up.

~~~
mmsimanga
I have a Nokia 730 Dual Sim. I have had it for close to 3 years. Great build
quality. I have dropped it several times and the phone is still intact (touch
wood). Battery lasts over two days. Here Maps work just fine. The only
downside is there are no user apps. No Firefox, no AnkiDroid, my bank doesn't
have a Windows Phone app. Despite lack of apps I am content with the phone. I
am trying to spend less time looking at my phone.

------
bArray
Speaking of challenging iOS and Android, not really heard too much from either
Firefox OS [1] or Ubuntu Touch [2] - seems as if both have officially been
dropped despite looking promising. I think the big two need some competition
in the mobile OS space but there doesn't seem to be big support from the
actual market itself.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch)

~~~
abrowne
FirefoxOS is back for "smart featurephones" in the fork KaiOS:
[https://www.kaiostech.com/](https://www.kaiostech.com/)

------
open-source-ux
It's a shame that Windows Phone never took off. Microsoft are known for
functional but clunky desktop software, but Windows Phone with the Metro UI
is, in my view, one of their best UIs. It doesn't feel like a Microsoft
product and it's quite refreshing that they took a different path from the UI
approach of iOS and Android. The simplicity of the live tiles is a neat way of
combining widget-like behaviour and launching an app. A single swipe from the
home screen gave you a A-Z list of your installed apps (not a grid of icons
like iOS and Android).

Contrast that with Android phone approach of separate app widgets, separate
app icons and even separate home screens. If you love to tweak to the nth
degree, you'll love such features. For the rest of us, it all feels stodgy and
overcooked for a smartphone.

Interestingly, Windows Phone design guidelines contained ideas we'd also see
later in Google's Material design guidelines e.g. such as the emphasis on
animation as more than just mere decoration.

Here is a presentation from the Windows 7 design team that describes the new
Windows Phone UI. It's from 2010:

[https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and-
des...](https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and-design-
language-3511859)

------
spikej
What about the fact that even the cheapest windows phone ran almost as
smooth/fast as a flagship Android phone?

~~~
saagarjha
Well, that's because Android was, until recently, a poor and laggy experience
even on flagship hardware.

------
TheWiseOne
I stuck with WP as long as I could and I still miss it. The polycarbonate
Nokia were tough as hell and felt solid in your hands.

IMO the OS was really solid. If they just stuck with it and kept building,
albeit targeting the people that didn't use a lot of apps, I think they
could've found a niche. They had close to 25% share already in countries like
Italy and Brazil and were popular in India, Africa, etc.

------
ChicagoDave
First of all, I owned four of the top line Windows Phones as the hardware
progressed and have been an MS oriented dev/arch throughout my career.

I switched back to an iPhone when MS started playing with the email and
calendar apps, making them horribly less useful. Around January of 2015. The 6
plus had just come out.

WP hardware was excellent until 2014 when it was clear MS had abandoned the
platform. They fell behind quickly at that point.

I knew the Midwest MS evangelist and went to a couple of dev sessions on WP
and the philosophy was to pump any garbage or duplicate app into the App
Store. I argued they should spend money on the top 100 business apps and just
make them better than iOS or Android. MS was never going to beat Apple at
cheap games.

Buying Nokia looked good on the outside but it was clearly a disaster.

$6 billion could have enabled a ton of devs to build a ton of apps.

I was sad to see it go, but in the end, my iPhone never really gets in my way.
I can email, message, call, and surf the web plus have a few other handy apps
that just work.

------
afandian
I feel the same way about my Blackberry Passport's BBOS 10. The UI is so nice,
functional and polished. A real shame it was cut down in its prime.

~~~
tacoman
I'm going to keep using mine until my place of work forces me off. It's such a
nice device and there is no app I need that doesn't work on it.

~~~
afandian
My next phone was going to be a Gemini PDA but (while it's amazing they got it
to market and it's an impressive bit of hardware) it doesn't compare to the
sound quality of the Passport and the keyboard is actually quite hard to use.

And "apps" is another word for clandestine data collection. Sms, web and email
is all I need and it does them excellently. I feel they avoided a lot of the
bullshit I see on ios and android by positioning it as a business not consumer
device.

------
roryisok
I still use it, and will continue to until I can't anymore. I'm on my third
Windows Phone, which I bought just a few weeks ago. I've tried to switch to
android, but after a few weeks I missed pinning tiles, and the simpler gallery
and superior keyboard

------
himme
I used windows phone for more than 3 years. Lumia 630, 730 and 550. To be
honest it is way better than android and iphone in terms of usability. I
concur with OP that metro UI and all dark theme was the best and unique. I
recently switched to android because of lack of updates in the basic apps that
I was using. It is still my backup phone. Ohh forgot about the keyboard and
unified messaging system. Loved cortana. One thing is I want to point out that
all email clients and calendar app should learn to do things right way outlook
apps in windows phone did. If you don't believe me use the native outlook and
calendar apps you will start hating the google clients. Great jobs phone team
at Microsoft!

------
fencepost
I had and used a Lumia 640 for quite a while and it was a really nice phone
aside from the app situation. I still have it around and fire it up
occasionally to see if there's another Insiders build update for it - if I
lose or break my current one I could easily see using it for a few days.

I also can't feel that I overpaid for it, I got the phone while they were
doing a promotion that also included a year of Office365 Personal - and I
think I may have paid less for the phone than that subscription price would
have been alone.

The app situation though, the app situation was grim even in browsers. I think
Edge on it has improved significantly as it has elsewhere, but for a long time
you had (pretty crappy) Edge and (pretty crappy) other browsers based on I'm
not sure what. I knew Chrome wasn't ever going to be on there, and Mozilla's
previous little adventure into other mobile devices had... not worked out for
them, but I was hoping someone like Dolphin Browser would manage to port onto
WP - it's webkit based, has or had its own implementation to work from
(Dolphin Jetpack, so they could update when the phone's built-in webkit was
slower), not tied to any Google Play services, etc. The death of Project
Astoria (the Android-to-Windows Bridge) signaled the death knell for that and
probably WP as well.

There were other security lockdowns that I found annoying (e.g. I upload my
call logs and SMS to be able to view calls on a calendar and SMS in email),
but the combination of "no apps" and "also no browser able to handle mobile
website versions properly" was a real killer.

------
untog
I switched from Android 2.something to Windows Phone and the entire experience
was a breath of fresh air. It performed as well and as smoothly as iOS, but
had easily the best UI out there.

It's difficult to remember now just how awful the UI of Android 2 was, and
Google let it stagnate entirely with an ill-advised focus on tablet. By the
time I returned to Android it was on version 4 and light years ahead of where
it was. The performance was (and still is) subpar, though.

------
fencepost
Regarding "Dark Mode" for Android on OLED devices as discussed in the article,
while Google/AOSP may not ever plan to have that there are a lot of steps that
you can take to get closer to it. Launcher changes (backgrounds, entirely new
launchers, icon packs like TwoPixel[0]), browser changes (Firefox addons like
Dark Background and Light Text [1][2]) possibly manufacturer-specific changes
(doesn't Samsung tweak a lot of stuff for AMOLED display?) and even
replacement firmware.

[0]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twop...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twopixel)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-
backgrou...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-
light-text/)

[2] [https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-
text-...](https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-
extension)

------
zoom6628
The only things i liked about Windows Phone were the menu/launcher and the
keyboard. Firstly the keyboard was the most accurate swiping input keyboard i
have ever used, to this this day. The second is that the Windows tiles and
list just make so much sense, surprisingly especially on a 7-8" tablet. Have
even put the MS Launcher onto my Blackberry DTEK60 and thoroughly enjoyed that
experience.

------
ernesth
To me, windows Phone was a nightmare. I previously had a symbian and every
interaction with windows phone made me regret it. Windows Phone was so locked
and worse than symbian!

You could not install another web browser (on symbian I was using opera or
opera mini).

There did not exist file explorers (apps could not get permissions to explore
local files).

Consequently, it was impossible to open html files (Edge, the only available
browser did not understand the file: protocol). I kept some data in html files
on my phone to always have them with me even when offline...

The dedicated search "button" was the worst idea ever: it had no use when
offline and was barely interesting when connected.

It would automatically turn mute when connected to a bluetooth speaker but
would forget to unmute when disconnected.

The volume control was even more confusing than android one (volume was
represented as a number, sometimes, max was 12, sometimes it was 32...).

The only good thing (the reason I chose windows phone rather than android) was
nokia's GPS app. But it was already ther on symbian!

Good riddance. I don't miss you windows phone!

~~~
digi_owl
Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility,
shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage.

Never mind that debacle early on when people discovered that WinPhone7 would
lock an inserted SD card to that specific device (a rarely used "feature" of
the Secure Digital standard). With the added irony that Symbian could unlock
said cards while Android could just reformat it.

Frankly i maintain that the introduction of the iPhone rolled back smartphone
development by a decade or more, as look were put before functionality and
what used to be a workhorse device became a glorified media player.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
>Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility,
shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage.

Backward compatibility with a platform which has almost zero market share is
worthless.

~~~
digi_owl
PocketPC/Mobile, in particular in the corporate world, was massive. And in the
"consumer" world, HTC made a name for itself by making PocketPC based devices
with a range of designs.

Come the Windows Phone 7 announcement, they also renamed the PocketPC lineage
to Phone 6.5, but it was clear that Microsoft was barely keeping it on life
support.

Thing was that Phone 7 could not run PocketPC lineage software, full stop.

This meant that all those corporate and consumer programs (Opera Mobile came
to be on PocketPC a decade before Americans were all hot and bothered about
web on a mobile devices) had to be rewritten anyways, so why not look for
alternatives (like Android).

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Yes, WinMo was still being used in the enterprise, mainly in industrial PDAs,
but definitely not in the consumer market.

I think that the main reason why Microsoft decided to drop compatibility with
WinMo (apart from small marketshare) was the fact that it was using
_extremely_ outdated UI conventions.

Almost all Windows Mobile apps were designed to be used with a stylus. Tiny
widgets, small fonts etc. There was no place for that in the post-iPhone-
launch world.

Benefits from creating new OS from scratch outweighted value added by
compatibility with an outdated platform.

------
hateful
Dark mode may be the #1 feature I want from any app or device. I tend to shy
away from anything I can't enable it on. I have an Android phone and each
version gets brighter.

I am in the apparent minority that knows that a screen isn't a piece of paper
and not in the majority of people who still believe myths about keeping the
light on when you watch TV.

~~~
roryisok
Even on Windows Phone though, Microsoft broke dark mode on their own apps.
OneNote always has a blindingly white background.

------
scarface74
A lot of the article just wasn't true.

System 7s redesigned happened because the old design was tied to fixed
resolutions - the original iPhone's and the iPad's. Skeumorphism didn't scale
with different screen sizes

Apple's extension system was already being used internally with Apple's
hardcoded integrations with Facebook and Twitter used it.

------
oneplane
I don't miss Windows Phone or Windows Mobile, but I do miss the idea of a
third mobile platform player.

------
djsumdog
I wish Windows had allowed other web browsers early on. By the time Microsoft
allowed native code, the few alpha projects of FireFox had been abandoned.

These phones do have UEFI+ARM. Has anyone unlocked the bootloader? I feel
these would be an ideal open source OS mobile platform for something like
Plasma.

------
notadoc
I also miss it and am disappointed Microsoft did not more aggressively pursue
Windows Phone. It was fast, unique, and offered legitimately good competition
to Apple and Google.

Continuum remains a fantastic idea, frankly I am surprised Apple hasn't
adopted something similar with iPhone.

------
__sr__
Nokia Lumia 1520 and 930 are two of the best phones I’ve ever used. More than
the tiled interface, I liked the consistancy and the coherence across the OS.
The OS followed a certain set of design principles throughout and what few
apps were available integrated well with it. Things like the various Hubs were
very nice and useful. I’ve always liked the idea of scopes from Ubuntu Phone,
and the Windows Phone Hubs were built along the same idea. I’ve always felt
that there should be a central app for each category which all providers
should integrate with, instead of having individual apps[1]. For example, I
usually want to watch a video, not YouTube/Netflix/Amazon Prime/whatever. The
Video Hub or Scope should aggregate videos from all the available sources. The
same concept can be applied to a Music, Messages etc.

Coming back to the point, coherence is something Android sorely lacks. Unless
you are using a phone with near stock Android[2], the apps are always out of
sync with the rest of the OS in terms of the design language. And many apps
don’t even follow the Google design guidelines. While there were not many non-
Nokia Windows phones, given their track record on Windows desktops, I don’t
think MS was going to allow that sort of interface customisation.

The lack of coherence enforces my view that Android is some sort of
Frankenstein’s Monster hastily cobbled together without putting much thought
into the design - internal or external.

I wish Windows Phone had survived, if only to provide some competition to
Android. Let’s face it, iOS and Android don’t really compete in any meaningful
way. Google is happy to stick to the volumes while Apple keeps the premium
segment.

And I wish I hadn’t sold my Lumia when Nokia/MS didn’t enable 4G/VoLTE for my
carrier. At least I’d be able to use it as a secondary phone.

[1] The individual apps can be there for people who like them, but they must
plug into the central hub. [2] With Pixel Launcher not being released for
other devices, it is not clear what “Stock Android” meany anymore — Google is
fragmenting Android themselves. Can you imagine the outrage if MS kept certain
Windows features exclusive to Surface?

------
jdhn
I really liked the tile aspect of the Windows Phone home screen. Being able to
resize the tiles and then get various levels of contextual information based
on the size of the tile was pretty rad, and I haven't seen anything like it
since.

------
DrBazza
Like many others here, I still rate my Samsung Omnia, running Windows Phone 7
as the best phone I've owned.

The mistake MS made, for me, was abandoning the existing WP7 phones for new
WP8 phones, no upgrade path, and taking so long to release WP8.

------
nwah1
I kept windows phone 10 up until this week.

I actually like that it pushes me to use mobile sites instead of apps.

Apps are closed ecosystems with app stores that charge a high markup. Sites
are free and open.

I can use Uber Lyft, and Facebook without apps.

But with discipline you can do this on Android too.

Pros:

Beautiful Live Tiles Simple interface Unified look Dark Mode Less bloatware

Cons:

On Windows 10 mobile, the phone would freeze up or even restart as much as
once per day

Drivers and software seem less optimized and performant even with powerful
hardware

Never found a mobile site that allows depositing checks

No Firefox

So as of this weekend I'm now using a fast, stable, cluttered, and ugly
Samsung phone loaded with bloatware.

I'm hoping LineageOS can make this more tolerable soon.

~~~
roryisok
Interesting admit the freezes / reloads. I bought a 950XL that would restart
constantly, at least once a day. A few weeks later i bought a 950 instead, for
the smaller form factor. The 950 has zero issues. It has never once frozen or
restarted. My point is, it's not Windows 10 mobile that caused that issue. You
might have had a bad battery or device

------
jmiller099
Lol, funny timing to see this. I pulled out my HTC Touch Pro 2 phone today
because it has a keyboard and wanted to do some quick ssh stuff from remotely.
Maybe not technically windows phone, since it was called windows mobile then
with different design goals.

Had to charge it for longer than recent phones needed, but it came up well
(except bluetooth). Fortunately WiFi worked with my current phone's hotspot.

After that had to find a solution for ssh client. Wound up using a midlet
runner found on xda-developers and an ssh jar file. The keyboard usage was
interesting after foregoing it for about a decade.

------
zw123456
I work for a large wireless company and I am a volunteer for the new device
employee testing program (you get new phones and try them out before they go
to market and give feedback, fun... sometimes). I was very pleasantly
surprised with the Windows phone and I had trialed a LOT of other phones over
the years. I actually thought they were on to something with the tiles, very
easy to read with a quick glance. It is too bad there is not a good 3rd
options IMO, right now you have basically iPhone and Android. I think it would
be good to have another player out there.

------
nostalgeek
All I say is competition is good.

I don't want to live in a world where Android is the only mobile OS out there.
This is also true for the desktop space, Windows dominance is an issue,
especially since the web didn't really fulfill its promise as an app platform,
something Linux would have benefited from greatly.

WP browser was also sub-part when it comes to JS/HTML5 support compared to
like Firefox on Android at that time. A good mobile browser is just the most
important thing for a smartphone.

------
coldacid
I still use my Lumia 950 as my every day cellphone. When it dies, my plan is
to just go back to whatever the most basic dumb phone will be at the time.
I've experienced Android and iPhone and neither of them hold a candle to the
experience I've had with Windows Phone / Win10 Mobile, so I'd rather just
reset back to a point where there weren't things like apps or mobile internet
if I can't keep mobile-friendly Windows on my phone.

------
Yhippa
Honestly I miss WebOS on the old Palm phones the most. That phone had
everything except hardware speed going for it. Everything including gestures
(cards), notifications, wireless charging, and universal search were 10 years
ahead of their time. The software was just too much for the hardware at that
time.

Windows Phone was a close second to me. The worst thing about this all is that
it seems impossible for a third vendor to be successful unless PWAs take off.

------
znpy
A colleague of mine has a windows phone with the dock that lets him use the
phone as a desktop computer.

It's super freaking cool.

It's sad that this direction is not being developed more.

~~~
wvenable
Samsung has the Dex doc for both the S8 and S9. Dock your phone and get a
desktop-like Android experience.

------
Gustomaximus
I was always surprised windows didn't do a real attempt on dockable phone ->
PC interface. It has so many consumer and enterprise points of entry.

~~~
digi_owl
They basically priced it out of the range of those consumers that could
benefit from it the most.

~~~
petecox
Yep, continuum seemed like a killer feature on release.

But I wasn't prepared to pay $AU1000 to try out a Lumia 950 at the time and
the 650 was far too anemic to support it.

~~~
roryisok
You can pick them up now for a quarter of that, second hand

------
kerng
I had one, an HTC. In grand scheme of things, right after the iPhone 3 it was
the best phone I ever owned. It was slick, fast and the UI made sense. But
there were no apps... The last few years I am using Android, not so impressed.
I made it a habit to switch between providers, so I dont develop a strong
association with either...

------
nailer
> Unified messaging – Microsoft’s messages hub let Windows Phone users chat
> via SMS or messaging apps like Skype in a single thread without needing to
> juggle separate apps.

This. I never used Windows Phone but I.Am.So.Tired of having to check inboxes
for WhatsApp, Email, Tinder, Bumble, Slack and every other app on my iPhone or
Android device.

~~~
lostmsu
Everybody ignored it though. They should have made a store policy.

------
MLR
I still use mine, I'm not a big user of apps generally so I can just about
squeak by, the tiled UI is still far and away the best available for phones.

I hope the Windows everywhere initiative eventually works out, they got a lot
of things right about the touch experience but they couldn't follow through on
a lot of it.

------
martin-adams
I would love to see Microsoft release a Windows skinned Android phone which
comes with all the Office apps, etc, but natively supports all the Android
apps.

This would then help consumers transition to a Microsoft future. It would
however be a blow to the Windows mobile operating system but that ship may
have already sailed.

~~~
roryisok
I wish they'd add live tiles to the launcher

------
lostmsu
I wish they'd at least kept Edge up to date. That would make my Elite x3 live
for another couple of years.

------
headsoup
I miss Windows Phone. Screen Glance, live tiles, bottom address bar, search
button, menus at bottom (until they put in hamburgers in W10), Etc.

It was a great phone OS, let down by MS's own declining support of it and the
App Gap (which didn't really affect me much, so the first point hurt most).

------
jh72de
Windows Phone may be dead, but Windows 10 is continuing the path to run on
both Intel and ARM and on all form factors with the same codebase, so finally
the next desktop PCs may be smarter than smartphones and equally mobile, at
least their core.

------
ma5ter
I bought a cheap windows phone for my mother four years back, even after 4
years, it works like the day I bought it (fast, no heating issues..), The big
fonts and tile interface makes it easy for her to use it without her glasses.

------
jh72de
While the app Drude mimics the messaging hub by combining fetched
notifications in on view, it's a question of when but whether the hub will
finally be brought to Android and iOS as well.

------
oculusthrift
i never owned one but i really liked their idea of having apps display some
data in the tile without having to open them up. Really sad that other phones
haven’t learned from this.

------
mmphosis
We need a Linux Phone.

~~~
dylan-m
Well, we had Meego, WebOS, and Firefox OS, and we failed them :( I wonder what
it would take for one of those to actually _succeed_ at this point?

Personally I'm finding that I care much less about what apps there are than I
did three years ago. It's easy to use progressive web apps whenever decent
ones exist, and so much of the functionality that used to be "download an app"
is just built in to Android and iOS now so I don't really think about it. That
and I guess I've started to accept (and I think there's a growing awareness)
that phones are being designed as soul-sucking addiction machines, so the idea
of smartphone games is somewhat less appealing…

~~~
seba_dos1
We never had Meego. We only had Maemo on Nokia N900, which did pretty well,
and a Maemo/Meego hybrid on Nokia N9, which was very highly acclaimed, but
already dead on arrival thanks to a backstab from Windows Phone (and some poor
Nokia management earlier that has led to this situation, to be fair).

------
Dolores12
The most annoying/stupid thing i found is one can not change sound volume
using Settings. One can change sound volume using hardware buttons only.

------
twblalock
Microsoft squandered an opportunity to make an alternative mobile OS at a time
when it was possible to do that. In 2010 when Windows Phone was released, the
app store concept was only a few years old and many people did not have
smartphones yet.

These days, I don't see how a new operating system could possibly succeed
unless it had all of the popular social media apps on day one.

------
readhn
i was pretty happy with windows phone but not being able to install many apps
killed it for me.

~~~
stinos
I never owned one and regret it: the couple of times I played around with
those Lumias etc I was pretty impressed, for reasons metnioned in the article,
and the article mentions even more things I didn't know. The whole thing felt
'fresh'. Not unlike the competition, but doing certain things different and
actually better. Also I don't care about many apps, so WP would probably have
been perfect for me.

------
hnfoobar
I miss it too... live tiles, outlook integration, camera, fresh new UI

------
skrebbel
I really like Windows Phone. Microsoft killed it themselves though, by killing
the project (I forgot the name) that made it possible to run Android apps on
Windows Phone.

All their other mistakes are dwarfed by this single screwup. It's like they
wanted it to fail.

~~~
tapoxi
Wouldn't the existence of semi-functional Android app compatibility just mean
that developers abandon native apps entirely? It reminds me of a similar
dilemma with OS/2\. It could run Windows apps, so people stopped writing
native ones.

~~~
skrebbel
Yes, totally. But given Windows's prevalence in businesses, there would've
been many serious reasons for business users to use Windows Phone, even if few
of the apps were native.

And on the consumer side, it was faster and leaner than Android at the time,
especially on cheaper hardware. I bet Android apps would've slowed that down a
bit but "I miss this one single app" wouldn't have been a reason to avoid the
platform anymore.

------
emersonrsantos
Windows Phone was a beautiful platform for consumers and developers. What
Samsung did for Android, Nokia Lumia line undid it for MS. Fautly hardware,
devices with one major OS version lifespan, shipped late to the market.

Nokia is the company that got stuck in 2005.

------
haolez
They could open source it. It felt like a robust software product.

------
dingo_bat
I miss Nokia. Those were the days the biggest mobile manufacturer actually did
things beneficial to users! Compare that to Apple today. No headphone jack
which is probably more used every day even now than their proprietary shit
port was ever used. Oh and the silly notch!

------
DEFCON28
WiFi password sharing was severely criticized when Microsoft introduced it.
But then Apple put in in iOS and nobody batted an eye.

There are some ideas that just need time.

~~~
robocat
The implementations are completely different.

Microsoft shared the password implicitly to "friends" without making the
security implications clear to the user.

It seems like Apple have made the security implications clear to the user: an
explicit choice to share the password to one person, and the prompt mentions
that a password is being shared.

The Microsoft implementation is rightly lambasted.

