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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.
I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.
name a few. please.
I'm open to being wrong but you need to provide evidence to sway me, because I've used windows phones and developed for them when they were desperate to get games in their app store and it was wretched early on. like comically bad. so whatever firmed up over the years, please, enlighten me, I'm genuinely curious where they were years ahead.
It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The "people" app already had everything the android's "contacts" app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.
The "me" app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.
I don't remember what it was, but the "mail" app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.
Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don't have in android today.
In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google's (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald's in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).
Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.
this was a response worth reading. TY for the deets.
Dark mode and live widgets.
Edit to add: https://www.howtogeek.com/809114/5-ways-windows-phone-was-ahead-of-its-time/
My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn't do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.
I tried it, but then realized I couldn't even view my photos I took with my Nexus phone at the time. No Google photos app, and the web browser just took me to a page that said my phone isn't supported.
YouTube was also only supported via a third party app, and was missing pretty much every feature.
As soon as I realized I would struggle to do the most basic tasks, I bailed.
I actually had a W10 phone as my work phone. I had no issues with the OS, but app availability was absolutely abysmal. All the crazy W8 touch optimizations suddenly made a lot of sense. Too bad it died so soon.