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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 failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.
Yep, if you don't even have the stuff the first iPhone came with, your platform isn't going to make it.
The first iPhone didn’t come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.
It did have YouTube and maps.
WP had a far superior 3rd party YouTube app than any other platform's first party app at the time. The only reason why they didn't have a first party was because Google was intentionally throwing road blocks to prevent it from happening.
They also had Nokia's maps which at the time were somehow faaar superior to Google's, even though Google Maps was the most popular platform.
The first iPhone didn't have anything. In terms of features it was laughable and it could barely be considered a smartphone. It succeeded because it was a phone on a touch screen that worked better than any previous attempt at touch screens.
Everything that made iPhone relevant against Android only came out later. Apple had a large quick start on hardware and UX, Android had a large quick start on the feature set. They both worked to close the gap and now we have two very similar products.
Microsoft didn't have that gap with Android on the OS level in any way. It could do everything. But they didn't have apps, because the devs didn't want a third OS to exist. Devs who just wanted to expand their customer base were making apps for wp just fine. Companies who wanted to manipulate the market into what was more convenient for them did not. Regular folks were making apps to get YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and that sort of stuff working on wp just fine - someone even made a Pokémon Go client that actually worked on windows phone, but the companies behind those platforms actively wanted those apps to not exist in any way.