
Android Killed Windows Phone, Not Apple - mpweiher
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-windows-phone-not-iphone
======
Rjevski
I'd say Microsoft killed Windows Phone. They reset the ecosystem twice (once
when Phone 7 apps weren't compatible with 8, and after then Phone 8 apps
weren't compatible with 10).

When you've got little apps to start with obviously the best idea was to throw
them all out twice and hope the developers are still interested. Not to
mention the dev environment required Windows 8 - personally this is what
discouraged me from even trying to develop on the platform, I wasn't going to
give up my perfect Windows 7 installation for a toy OS that will allow me to
create apps for a toy phone while getting in my way when I tried to do real
work.

Add to that a shitty web browser and quite slow devices and obviously its
failure must be the fault of the competition, I mean how can such a great
product fail?

The only good thing I can remember about my Windows Phone is that it handled
IMAP push notifications, something iOS is still lacking.

~~~
skinnymuch
Wow. I can't believe there were all these restrictions and upheavals. I loved
two of my Lumia devices. I didn't know you needed Windows 8 for development.
Bad move. No less with the phone doing better in different parts of the world,
having Windows 8 as a requirement is obviously bad.

The incompatibility of apps was lame the first go around. I had bad luck with
my devices and so I was out by the time of Windows 10. I didn't know the
incompatibility happened a second time.

I don't think the browser or "slow devices" as you say are the reason for its
demise at all though. Windows on mobile was a great OS.

I believe even with all the faults you mention, if they were somehow able to
get the top 25 to 50 apps onto their store, we would still have Windows mobile
around today with a ~10% market share worldwide (varying greatly by country).

Of course getting the apps onto their store would be an undertaking so it's
quite hypothetical. My main point is, I firmly believe that is what killed
Windows and any other OS that arrived late or never got popular enough by 2011
or so, when a few major apps were already desired by many people or at least
the hype and talk would tell people that.

P.S. I miss webOS even more than Windows 8 :/. So sad we are left with two
mobile OS options knowing there were good ones that didn't survive.

~~~
roryisok
Microsoft worked hard to get the top apps on the store, but you cant force a
company to release an app for your OS. The biggest blow was google not giving
them anything. No official YouTube app, no gmail, no maps etc. There were
third party and even MS / Nokia apps that filled the gap just fine, but
newcomers wanted to install gmail.

Google actively fought MS on windows phone. It seems silly now that they'd see
WP as a threat at all, but even 2-3 years ago they were sabotaging MSs
attempts to build a youtube app. MS released a great yt app for about a week
and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even
blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own
ios and android apps also were. IIRC it was to do with displaying ads. At the
time the official google apps did not do ads. MS had to revert to essentially
a shortcut to YouTube in the browser.

Aside from that most of the big players were there, but when new trendy app
would launch, it would launch on android and IOS. WP users would have to wait
for a critical mass of popularity in the hope that there would be a port.

~~~
kartickv
You can't force people to release an app, but you can incent them. Conduct
market research to find out which missing services are the blocking factors
for people to switch. Then approach those companies and guarantee a minimum
revenue from WP. If the app makes less, Microsoft will make up the difference.
Lend Microsoft engineers to those companies. Or contract it out and have
Microsoft pay the bill. Or let Microsoft use public APIs to build third-party
apps for those services. Don't take a 30% cut of the money users pay,
temporarily.

There were many things Microsoft could do, but it seems they weren't fully
committed to the platform.

~~~
roryisok
They did that.

TheVerge reported them paying up to $100,000 to companies to port their apps
to the store.

[https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-
paying-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-
companies-100k-windows-phone-apps)

That was back in 2013. Foursquare was one of those - MS covered the cost of
porting it to WP. They even hired an outside developer team to do it.

~~~
kartickv
Thanks, I didn't know that.

------
petilon
It was Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky that killed Windows Phone. They
killed it first by being late: Android released September 2008, Windows Phone
was released November 2010. Two years behind Android!! They killed it also by
being not sufficiently differentiated. Then they also killed it with the bland
Metro look & feel. Microsoft learned nothing from previous failures such as
Zune.

Microsoft has learned nothing from the failure of Windows Phone, and is now in
the process of killing Windows. Yes, Windows 10 is pretty good, but as an app
platform it is a failure. Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure
Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. And why would any
developer make native Windows apps? Ordinary users can't tell an app built
using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland
flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end
users don't know to demand Windows native apps. So developers are better off
using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. (Yes, Electron is bloated
but if your application is substantial this is not a deal breaker.)

~~~
kitsunesoba
I've had interest in writing native Windows (desktop) apps in the recent past,
but the confusing messaging/lack of commitment to any particular direction was
a real turnoff. On Apple platforms, the only real choice you make is between
Swift and Objective-C because either way you'll be using Cocoa. Microsoft
would do well to bring that sense of clarity to their dev scene.

~~~
flukus
The other problem is that after they finally showed a direction (xaml/UWP) no
backwards compatibility was offered, you had to choose between the now
deprecated libraries and have an app that worked on windows 7+, or you could
choose the new ones and have it only work on windows 10.

Had UWP run on windows 7 we might have seen some more take-up.

~~~
pjmlp
UWP cannot run on Windows 7 because it requires a container model, which I
doubt they could just patch on Windows 7.

~~~
icebraining
They probably couldn't just port the patches, but there's no reason why they
couldn't write a runtime environment on W7, even if it didn't provide the same
security guarantees.

------
abdulmuhaimin
Back in the days, I thought Nokia with its Meego OS will run away with the 3rd
OS title. It was an OS that was much hyped when its still in development.

Thanks to Elop and Microsoft we never see that happening. It was killed before
it was even born.

I bought the Nokia N9(the only Meego phone released) a couple of month after
its launch, knowing the OS is coming to its end. The Meego OS was a very
polished and well-made OS. It was smooth, very intuitive, and simply the best
touchscreen smartphone experience I've ever had. Thats was why Elop and WP
infuriate me so much. It was a missed opportunity. Nokia took the easy route
of getting paid by Microsoft to use its OS, and that bite them in the ass.

And so I'm glad that trash WP and Nokia failed spectacularly

~~~
memsom
Old school N800/N810 owner here. Nokia failed long before the N900, let alone
the N9. You had the Symbian business unit veto-ing the release of any Maemo
(Meego's name before they tried to align with the other players that had a
desktop OS along the same lines.) Every release was incompatible with the
last.. for example NIT2006 (N770) was incompatible with NIT2007 (N800, and a
bleeding edge port for N770 because som many users were upset the device got
dropped) was incompatible with NIT2008 (N800) was incompatible with NIT2008
R2/Diablo (N800, N810) - this lost a massive amount of packaged software, and
alienated the community. I mean, the N770 had many hundreds of packages. The
N800 had a few hundred (like, half, maybe less), the N810 was getting to the
point were Nokia's own repo was looking bare, and third parties were the only
real support. Then the next OS version (Harmatten?) was for the N900 only.
Then they were moving to Qt, even though we were promised that GTK+ would
always be the UI tool kit. Nokia management bungled everything. Made
supporting the device a horrible experience, and people left. I'm happy that
you liked the N9, but the writing was on the wall maybe 2 or 3 years prior to
that, around when the N900 appeared.

~~~
digi_owl
Funny, i only recall the N900 being a compatibility break.

The 770 to N810 issue was hardware performance, not platform breakage. The 770
was simply too damn hardware constrained compared to the N800/810 (basically a
N800 with a keyboard, and just a single SD slot).

The N900 on the other hand introduced a whole new UI, QT as the primary UI
framework, and beefed up the hardware on top.

Yes you could still attempt to run N900 programs on the N800, but they would
rarely fit the screen etc.

------
bsclifton
I don't think there is a single smoking gun- many things contributed to the
downfall of Windows Phone. Microsoft had a decent market share with the old
Windows CE based smart phones.

\- Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had
~42% marketshare in 2007)

\- Windows Phone 7 was great, but it was too late by then (2010... 3 years
after iPhone was release and 2 years after first Android phone)

\- There were two resets (7 => 8, 8 => 10) which screwed customers hard. With
the 7 => 8 upgrade, not only were apps incompatible, the OS was incompatible
with previous hardware.

\- The App Store was mostly full of garbage apps (lots of fake apps- hard to
fine the genuine app)

\- Carriers didn't do a very good job pushing Windows Phone (can you blame
them? :P )

From my perspective (former WP user, 2011 - 2015), the biggest WTF to me was
when Microsoft bought Nokia. That seems to be about the time they just
completely gave up

~~~
pjmlp
Actually three resets, 8 => 8.1 was also a kind of reset with the introduction
of universal apps.

~~~
bsclifton
That's a great point- while consumers may not have been affected by this
heavily, developers had to update their apps. Lots of companies just stopped
supporting their apps rather than invest time updating

------
bitmapbrother
I disagree with this blogger's analysis. Instead, I believe Windows Phone
commited suicide. When you osbourne your platform repeatedly, change your
development strategy numerous times and alienate current and potential
developers you have no one to blame but yourself. So, when Windows Phone saw
the end coming it decided to end its struggle and quit trying to fight the
inevitable.

~~~
icelancer
>osbourne your platform repeatedly

Heh, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Just got done watching a bunch of 8-bit Guy
videos on the topic.

I also strongly agree. Two reboots was ridiculous in the time period that the
phone was relevant.

------
gok
The DOJ killed Windows Phone. If Microsoft wasn’t worried about antitrust
suits, they would have given Windows away for free on phones to build up
market share and OEMs wouldn’t have had to go to Google to get a free OS.

~~~
FRex
Source? In a country as lobbied and lawyered up as USA what kind of crazy
antitrust laws can affect a mobile OS that is an absolute underdog with single
digit market share and two HUGE competitors?

~~~
WorldMaker
From what I gather (and I don't have any more source than word of mouth/rumor,
either): at that point of Windows Phone it wasn't any laws or direct legal
reasons, but the ghosts of the US DOJ and EU Court of Justice rulings that had
Microsoft still worried about changing business models and giving anything
Windows related away for free.

Though a lot of that was still momentum/inertia, too. Microsoft had always
charged for Windows on every platform, that business model was largely sound
and safe.

In Windows 10 there was enough push to change that business model, but the
hesitancy in the Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 timeframes to do that
probably did lead a lot of handset manufacturers to "free" Android SKUs.

------
holydude
I believe WP/MS committed suicide. They did not listen to their market and
apart from the obvious app compatibility and lack of apps in general they
totally forgot about people not really liking the unified design of the phones
(you can't go the apple way if your audience does not like your defaults).
Tiles were really meh and people still prefer app icons a la ios/android.

I believe Microsoft still has a chance but they need to 1) talk to samsung and
other big android/smartphone manufacturers 2) make a killer feature

~~~
roryisok
The thing people liked most about wp was it had a different UI. There were
people that didn't like it, sure, but WPs main cheering point was the original
UI. That was absolutely not the problem

"talk to Samsung"? Samsung dominate android phone sales. They are single
handedly winning the phone wars against iphone. Why would they now support a
potential challenge to that?

~~~
pjmlp
They also have their own OS to worry about, which they are rebooting once
more, now with .NET Core as SDK.

------
nwah1
The Universal Apps idea makes a lot of sense, and I don't think the refactors
are what harmed it. Getting a late start is the primary problem, since it is
all about getting apps. Windows succeeded on the desktop for that reason, and
failed on mobile so far for the same reason.

But they have made all the right moves over the past five years, and have lots
of momentum, cash, and goodwill from the tech community. They will do some
sort of big mobile push in the near future. Probably some kind of Surface
Phone, which can double as a desktop.

~~~
roryisok
I agree this is likely. Windows 10 is very successful, thanks to answering
what people hated about 8, huge marketing effort, and the surface hardware.
UWP will continue to grow because it is the way to build apps on win10, xbox
and hololens.

A surface phone would leverage the surface brand, retain compatibility from
wp10 (and wp8/8.1 despite what some seem to believe), and be able to run a
full Desktop OS via continuum, the killer feature that never killed.

Windows 10 S is a clear attempt to push UWP going forward. I think this is
with a view to future arm devices. It really seems like winRT again from the
other direction. Right now you can upgrade 10S to run full Desktop apps but on
future devices (ARM) who knows?

There's also talk of x86 emulation on ARM now that Intel has given up on
mobile.

~~~
WorldMaker
I'm a weird optimist, but I don't see Windows 10 on mobile devices "dying",
even if it is in a zombie state, precisely for these reasons that they've been
making a lot of the right moves. With Windows 10 on mobile just being another
SKU of mainline Windows now and with Windows 10 S being a very similar SKU, it
doesn't make sense for Microsoft to "kill" anything so long as there are
devices that want to run it.

So too with x86 on ARM emulation there's a bridge for that gap that "ARM
Windows is not _real_ Windows" now.

I expect Microsoft will continue to make plays in the space for Windows 10 on
mobile/pocket PCs, especially when the timing is right (the right hardware
combo, perhaps; or more of the mobile-intended "Redstone" features finish out,
maybe).

------
greyman
I wonder how the fight between Android and iOS will go on. I kind of never
liked Android and never owned one, but my wife had several Android devices and
I always considered them inferior comparing to iOS. Mostly talking about
operating system and how you "feel" using the device. But just yesterday I
bought Siemens A3 2017 model to my daughter, for 300 eur, and I was surprised
how similarly the phone felt to my iPhone 6s, which I paid 800 eur for... if
this will continue, I am not sure if I stay with iOS after my next phone
upgrade.

Also, I don't fully buy the argument that Windows Phone was unsuccessful
because it was late. I think that doesn't matter that much - changing phones
and even phone operating system isn't such a big deal. After using iOS for
about 8 years, I have no problem to switch to something else, if it proves to
be better, or equal but cheaper. If Windows Phone would be better back then,
more people would switch to it after their next phone upgrade.

------
shmerl
I don't regret MS messing up their mobile strategy, except for them directing
Nokia to kill Meego. That was a pretty bad loss.

~~~
wvh
One can only foolishly hope Nokia'd consider pulling in Sailfish again for
some devices. The circle would be complete and "Meego" would be back to where
it was just before the board sold the company to Microsoft. Perhaps not on the
road to world domination, but there's _got_ to be some market share for a
mobile OS that is not Android or iOS...

------
roryisok
I read this on my Lumia 925, which I continue to build apps for. I have a
newer android phone for testing and building apps, but the wp is still my day
to day phone. I think there will continue to be a niche market for wp, for the
people that love it, and that see it as a superior UI.

IOS and android are the future, but WP is vinyl

------
Nursie
I watched the tech news about Windows Phone over the years it was released as
7 and 8.

The paid-for hype was obvious and hollow. Commentators sprung up in tech-
related forums everywhere, singing the praises of the development experience
of WP 7 with personal testimony of how awesome it was, months before it was
available to developers. Then scarcely a year later, when it was clear that
WP7 was not setting the world on fire, exactly the same obvious, transparent
marketing hype started being produced for WP8. When challenged about this, it
was declaimed that WP7 had only ever been meant as a transition phase, and 8
was where it was really the future!

It was so blatant, and so pointless.

------
skinnymuch
What ever happened to the project to port iOS and Android apps to Windows?
Neither of them working out sucks. I thought if one of them could work out, as
long as the porting didn't require more than 10 or 15 percent of a code base
to be changed, that could've saved Windows mobile enough to have maybe a 10%
market share and perhaps stay in the game. But maybe being that small was
never going to be worth it for Microsoft.

~~~
bitmapbrother
The project to port iOS apps to WP was called Project Islandwood.
Unfortunately, no iOS developers wanted to waste their time porting their apps
to a platform that had no users. So it was a bridge to nowhere.

~~~
LeoNatan25
That's not true. At the time, we gave a serious thought of supporting the
platform. A quick inspection of Islandwood, however, was enough to convince us
otherwise—be it the frameworks that were missing, hilariously bad
implementations of those that were there, dubious choices of the ObjC runtime,
the fact that only handful of people from Microsoft actually worked on it,
etc. It was an immensely embarrassing project, to be honest. Providing a
clean–room implementation of such a mature ecosystem is no small task, of
course, but what Microsoft presented was just embarrassing.

------
expertentipp
I still remember Lumia 800, the bastard child. MeeGo smartphone with pre-
installed Windows Phone version which hadn't even lived one year. Microsoft
killed Windows Phone. When it comes to operating systems, without public
administration and corporate clients they are unable to attract individual
consumers and gain any significant market share.

------
senthilnayagam
Someone approached us for building multiple apps for windows phone presumably
on behalf of Microsoft.

We would get paid for having our app on store. Seems the person who reached
was a middle man and was more interested in making money for himself than
getting good apps built.

I knew there was no way they could recover from that situation.

------
tmbsundar
I would also wager that a lack of a thriving app store eco-system was/is a
major factor that played Windows down.

By the time Windows entered the Market, Android and iOS had the critical mass
of developers and users in downloading games and apps from their respective
apps stores and Windows could not break into the network effect.

------
skc
Well, really it ended up boiling down to how late they were to enter the
market. By the time they had set a toe in, the app gap was already far too
wide to make a difference.

They could have built an OS that was light-years ahead of iOS and Android and
it still wouldn't have mattered because no apps, no sale.

------
eight_ender
When I look back at the spectacular mobile OS implosions of that era I feel
like Windows Phone deserved to die, but Palm's WebOS I'm still a bit sad
about.

Their hail mary was impressive and ahead of it's time, but there was no room
for a #3 in the market with Google giving away everything for free.

------
caycep
This is basically stratechery's line of writing on Android...

