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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#511

Post by raydev »

stillsut wrote: post #464
dtx1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…

> it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare, but these apps keep getting cranked out. The Android / iOS language and platform api's are SNAFU, but people get still get into the IDE and start making, without any promise for a set of c…

> A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare

Xcode is absolutely sits at the bottom of the IDE rankings, but Eclipse shouldn't even be a concern for Android devs.

Android Studio is a very nice IDE and no Android dev should touch Eclipse ever again. It's a shame it's tied to the Android platform, honestly.

I'd kill to have Android Studio's functionality when developing for iOS. (And no, AppCode doesn't make the cut)

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#512

Post by pedasmith »

chungy wrote: post #448
digi_owl wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps? I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by…

I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted, for each $10 app, about $11 of revenue. The result: we decided that it would be essentially impossible to ever make money from phone apps.

What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people.

[disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#514

Post by arenaninja »

mattnewport wrote: post #345
arenaninja wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought someone a Windows phone and they had the same feedback - big name apps not available (whatsapp, instagram, etc.) I wanted to buy a Windows phone since I use none of these apps, but there was no hardware refresh or major announcements around Windows phones and that deterred me. I don't understand how MS went on to a successful Surface and failed phones, I would think they're similar markets - hype-driven, tak…

There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.

Yes I imagine some of these exist now, I purchased that device some years ago now

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#515

Post by cjsuk »

bnolsen wrote: post #466
maxxxxx wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I can't even imagine how 3rd party tool developers feel. Let's say you have a grid component. In the last few years you had to do a Winforms and several XAML versions( WPF, WinRT, Silverlight and now UWP). The XAML look superficially the same but all have their set of weird limitations and bugs. I am definitely done with Windows desktop.

Wow, imagine someone trying to make this statement 15 years ago...things have sure changed.

Indeed. 15 years ago I kind of enjoyed it. Win32/winforms is still less horrible than the web these days.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#517

Post by GeekyBear »

nova22033 wrote: post #65
nathantotten wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…

>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?

This was the strategy that Apple followed when OS X first came out.

Third party developers were moving slowly (or not at all) so Apple started developing and giving away (or selling) apps that showed off what you could do with the new platform.

They developed Safari when Microsoft lost interest in further development of Internet Explorer. The iLife suite had iTunes, iCal, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb and GarageBand. The iWork suite had Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. They created (or bought) professional apps like Logic Pro, Final Cut, Shake, Motion and Aperture.

If you have a new platform and third party developers don't step up, then you need to start filling those holes yourself in a way that shows off your platform's advantages, and keep at it.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#519

Post by fpig »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #498
narrator wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.

I'm not sure it requires a rewrite, the old stuff still works. The trouble is the constant churn is draining, I've pretty much abandoned the platform because of it. We keep hearing about new JavaScript frameworks but we had exactly the same from MS: win32 => MFC => WTL => VB => WFC => Winforms => WPF => Metro => UWP, no doubt there is something else just around the corner.

Calling that "constant churn" is a massive exaggeration. First, using WTL or WFC were just bad decisions because those were side-projects and MS never told companies to switch to that and definitely didn't encourage rewrites into that. They were not replacements of anything by any stretch of imagination. That's like complaining that MS made you rewrite your app in Lightswitch or IronPython. It is just a side-project, not something ever intended to become the main MS dev stack.

So realistically for most MS stack devs it was MFC -> VB -> WinForms -> WPF -> Metro -> UWP. And MFC was released 25 years ago. So they switched 5 times in 25 years. You could possibly add Silverlight in there (which is extremely similar to WPF so only half-counts for churn purposes).

Now, I agree that the Metro -> UWP part was unnecessary because they were doing the same thing twice so they should have gotten it right the first time (and I think the whole UWP concept is worthless anyway).

If we look at MFC -> VB -> WinForms -> WPF, all those technologies provided a lot of value to us and it was very useful to have them. Would you want to still be programming in MFC today? I am pretty sure you wouldn't. I do not feel any "churn" from this (note: I never switched to Metro/UWP because I considered it a step backwards, unlike the previous "switches", so I stopped at WPF when it comes to desktop), I can barely remember programming in VB 6.0 because it was such a long time ago.

Saying that's "exactly the same" as the situation with web is ridiculous.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#520

Post by v-yadli »

smitherfield wrote: post #477
v-yadli wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://mobilehtml5.org/ I'm interested in how you would define full-featured . Please check the symbian & opera columns. Also, iOS 1.0 ships with Safari3.0, not Safari3.1.1 in this test. In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :) Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay…

I mean full-featured in the sense of end user experience. If you have any example prior to 2007 of a mobile browser rendering the full New York Times website perfectly,[1] I'm all ears. But as I remember the below link was, for good reason, the biggest "wow" moment of any demo Steve Jobs ever gave. [1] https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s

I partially agree with you, in that the rendering of the page is good-looking in circa 2007 standard on a mobile device. But rendering one page nicely does not prove it is full-featured. It has to go through some kind of benchmark, which reflects the general ability to process trillions of other pages out there. It loses to Opera Mobile or Symbian browser on the test I just googled (not sure about how accurate it is though).

A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client.

I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground.

Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3.

Edit: adding explainations.

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