alt Hacker NewsWindows Phone was actually doing well and adoption was taking off when Nadella came in and killed it. It didn't help that they changed the app framework and then blamed lack of apps. Such a brain-dead decision.
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sylens • last Saturday at 1:02 PM
Windows Phone 7 was doing well; for some reason they did a breaking change with Windows Phone 8 and broke app compatibility. I will never understand that, they kneecapped themselves despite being multiple laps behind Apple and Google already…
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Windows Phone was dead in the water because many services did not have first party support, and the third party clients kept getting killed / people banned from said services.
Google was extremely aggressive in muscling Microsoft out. They refused to release a Gmail, YouTube or Maps client for Windows Phone but made sure those services did not work (properly).
And indeed on top of that, Microsoft switched UI frameworks 3 or 4 times. And they left phones behind on the old OS releases repeatedly, that then couldn't run the new frameworks.
Still, Windows Phone its UI concept was really great, and I sorely miss the durability of polycarbonate bodies versus the glass, metal and standard plastic bodies of today.