What went wrong?

More specifically, why there was "no apps"?

Because Microsoft tried to push their way into an established market that had no need for them. They didn't do anything particularly better than the competitors, and almost everyone was already invested in an existing ecosystem in some way. Windows Phone was doomed to failure from the start.

they tried to intrude in a saturated market where their only marketing strategy is saturation

There was no need for it. iOS and Android were already established. Windows Phone offered only two things (let's just ignore WP7 like everyone else did):

- Very good performance even on the cheapest phone (Lumia 520)
- Well designed, intuitive UI

But what does it matter? It didn't take long for cheap Android phones that aren't total shit to depreciate cheap WP offerings. And if you were planning on investing more, WP was a waste due to lack of functionality. Developers didn't extend money and effort into developing for it because it wasn't established enough to justify the cost. And it wasn't established enough because there was a lack of popular apps. It's a vicious circle.

>WP was a waste due to lack of functionality
How so?

UWP is still emerging as a good platform.


The Pajeets at Windows are doing a good job with UWP, I just hope they keep it up.

Tell you the truth, I don't fucking know. All I heard were people complaining about a lack of this or that app so I assume there was a lack of functionality there.

I still use a Lumia 520 and I only bought it because I wanted something to read books on while out and about. Now that I have an e-ink reader, I might as well be using a dumbphone. That said however, all the reader apps were bad and didn't process epub files properly so formatting was off. Didn't matter to me much though. Also, one time I wanted to watch a twitch stream in a restaurant and I couldn't get the phone to cooperate.

Smartphones are a bit silly in my opinion though.

>
>>WP was a waste due to lack of functionality
>How so?

Because why would you spend money on a flagship if its OS barely has an apps?

I own a WP.

The entire brand is redundant. They're just Android phones with fewer apps.

I know what you mean, I'm still using an old Lumia 630 just to read books, shitpost and make/receive some calls and messages.

I know there's a gigantic lack of apps but I never knew why.
Since it's a Windows environment or something near it, I thought it would have a lot of support from desktop devs, but it looks like it wasn't true, at least for WP8 and 8.1.

I own a Lumia 950 XL.

Resuming... Resuming... Resuming...

I have the same phone and I've never had this happen
I pretty much love it other than maybe not getting the normie nintendo apps

I can't wait for the day that the last Lumia dies. Laggy, buggy pieces of shit.

they should've made it compatible across the board:from winxp above

When smartphones started to take off the dream was for any rando to learn how to mobile dev, publish an app and leverage the publishing capabilities of the application stores to get that sweet side income money
Apple store and android market quickly became saturated as everybody jumped on the bandwagon and smaller and smaller use case niches got filled, turning the fact of developping a mobile application not a competitive advantage anymore
So what prevented random individual mobile dev to live the dream on windows phone and develop easy applications to fill the needs of its small userbase hoping to make a quick buck ?

Lumia's already dead though. Last Lumia flagship is from 2015.

WP10 is where it went wrong, they released it was more android-like, but worse, it was released as a fucking beta. So people got flagship WP phones with an OS that had a broken WP on it.

Then they exited the mobile market altogether.

As for the apps, they were slowly coming along. To make this faster, instead of making app creation piss easy, they built an ios/android app emulator. Which really just meant that there's no point in building WP apps anymore, since Android ones would work - this royally pissed off the little loyal developer base, and they fucked right off. Then they said that the Android emulator isn't coming (then exited the market).

It's a shame because other than the apps thing, WP was probably the most useful mobile OS. I love its UI. But now I have no upgrade path for my Lumia phone; have to hold on to it until it breaks and then start completely anew on an iphone.

From what i read, Microsoft was supposed to make it that Android apps were going to be run on wp. That was a long time ago though and was promised with wp10.

They didn't think having a good product was important. They assumed with enough marketing and business deals they could force iphone and android out of the market even if they offered no advantage to consumers.

This sort of thing worked well for them in the 1990s but they never adapted to how the world changed. You can see the same pattern with the xbone and windows 10.

It's basically Bill Gates take on the 90s internet all over again. MS was one of the first companies to produce good smart phones, but the old CE based software was rigidly enterprise business oriented.

Meanwhile iPhone took hold and MS has been playing catchup ever since. They had a chance with W10M, but the install base was just never going to materialize and they did literally nothing with their Nokia acquisition other than produce some great hardware that nobody ever used.

Still the best UI though, oh well

We're talking about WP here, not Android.

WP was shit, but it definitely wasn't laggy unless you bought a sub $100 currynigger phone

no apps because people didn't use windows phone because no apps, one example, snapshit

Even the shittiest Lumia 520 ran faster than most Android flagships. The one thing that Windows isn't is slow.

my 830 is still running great

The fact that only Indians bought WPs. People who buy cheap things don't spend money on apps.

same reason Linux isn't big on the desktop. MS tried to break into a market that was already saturated.

the combination of baby duck syndrome, the average consumer's aversion to leaving their comfort zone and the chicken and egg scenario of no-users-no-devs-no-users makes it so Windows Phone will never gain a foothold

unless either apple or google fuck up in some major way, that is.

>What went wrong?
There's still no official announcement coming from IndianCurry's mouth of it being dead, despite the universal acclaim of it being dead or it dying quarterly.

It Think the real problem with WP was the past deeds of Microsoft. Most people doesn't know anything about computers and doesn't care about the business practices of a company but potential business partners do and that was what MS needed to become successful on the mobile side.

I guess they think the mobile devices was just a temporary fad and considering around 2008-10 they already practically controlled the desktop business they didn't care. However when the mobile market became lucrative probably most companies decided to not support them due to their anti-competitive behavior, so even with all their resources, due to the fact that people just uses whatever comes bundled with the hardware (if people relates the brand "windows" with quality they would have rejected other OS), coming bundled with only an small fraction of all the devices killed them in the exact same way they put out of business their past competitors: making them fall into a vicious circle, if your marketshare is low you'll receive low priority from third parties and if you lack applications your product will not be attractive. In short WP now is hardly even for a niche market which is the MS true lover, because it has all the disadvantages of linux on the desktop for example without any of the advantages.

Specifically, Microsoft fucking over Nokia..
Nokia design and built phones were the golden
age of WP.. When MS took the reins everything went to shit, WP went from promising OS for the future to dying OS with no future

They had no flagships for far too long. Any popularity they gained with the 20 series was dwindling. By the time the new flagships were released you got a buggy as fuck phone.

They kept on introducing new versions that broke compatibility with the old ones.
WP7, WP8, W10M, and now W10 on ARM.

>It Think the real problem with WP was the past deeds of Microsoft. Most people doesn't know anything about computers and doesn't care about the business practices of a company but potential business partners do and that was what MS needed to become successful on the mobile side.
They had plenty of support, they made an endless amount of arrogant and stupid choices. WP7 was winCE based, couldn't multitask and lacked basic features. They only allowed the phones to run on one specific low end qualcomm SoC. Just that choice alone meant their phones had a 12 month old midrange SoC. Then they ditched WP7 for WP8 an entirely new OS running a different kernel. They still had the same SoC issue, everything would always ship with an outdated model because they demand directx drivers and crap.

Worth the shot of possibly becoming the next apple or beyond, I imagine. Whoever's in charge might've felt willing to risk it. Same with google+ or whatever it was called.

Bullshit. They dropped Windows phone 8.1 too soon. Windows 10 mobile delayed too long and still a buggy mess when released. Also new Poo CEO against the Nokia acquisition so he scrapped Ballmer's original plan.
W10 on ARM is for laptop and tablet, not related to Windows phone/mobile.

Not saying they had no support but i must disagree with the "plenty" part, the amount of phones and tablets shipped with windows compared to android was always ridiculous. For the average joe unless the product is pretty broken the quality or the technical merits doesn't matter, even with all the silly decisions the only necessary thing they need to make WP successful was bundling a lot of hardware with their software because people rarely even knows what an OS is. For some reason companies didn't want to partner with MS despite the brand Windows being a synonym of computer, it was obvious the demand would have been high due to familiarity, yet they decided to work with google instead. Google at least know how to work with others but Microsoft is already well known to try to lock the market and screw any other company that tries to compete with them in any way unless in situations where they're losing hard, this makes MS a pretty risky partner unless you have a lot to win and you can assume the risk after that. Now for Microsoft is necessary to show a LOT of good faith, they're trying but it'll take time and now it's a bit late because the brand android is practically synonym of mobile device.

It doesn't look like they're trying. Still, they're asking for time they don't have.
Microsoft isn't getting a piece of the mobile pie. It's all Android and Apple now.

this.

>need to have apps to sell phones
>need to sell phones to develop apps

Really makes you think.

But phones are a solved problem at this point, iPhones sell for the same reason Chanel handbags do.

WP never had the image although of the three, it has the best UI and is by far the most consistent (IoS fails this, Android doesn't even try).

I do believe a third party could be disruptive but the market structure is broken for now (carriers having undue influence, hardware bought on credit, its too easy to break the market - you have what they allow you to have not what you want to buy).

>spend billions acquiring Nokia
>immediately stop selling Windows phones right afterwards
Geeee, what went wrong indeed?

Number of apps is directly proportional to the market share, of which mobile Windows has none.

Kinda agree

Also with W10M they got totally rid of the good performance and UI. It turned both to total shit. The performace is terrible even on high-end devices and the app sore for example is an absolute UI nightmare.

t. ex-WP user

>From what i read, Microsoft was supposed to make it that Android apps were going to be run on wp.

That was just another pajeet-tier Microsoft mistake:
>announce that your platform will be able to run Android apps without the need to port them
>because of this developers decide not to do native ports of their apps
>pull the android app feature when it's months away from completion (even after numerous public betas showed it working, and people were convinced there was no need to port their apps)
>act surprised when there's no apps for their platform

Granted we got the Linux kernel shit for Windows 10 out of it, but it was still a really stupid move on their part.

I wouldn't be surprised if that Linux stuff gets dropped from Win10 sooner or later anyway, been months since they released it and they still haven't officially supported anything other than Ubuntu, seems to just be yet another thing MS introduced with no intention of supporting it.

It happens nowadays with WhatsApp only, but earlier it used to happen to nearly every app.

Lumia 1020 successor was never materialized. I and about 83 other guys around the world were ready to buy one.

Bad designed, bad UI.