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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

#701

Post by zyme »

JamesUtah07 wrote: post #269
toast0 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of apps was annoying at time, but what made me leave was probably Microsoft Edge. The rendering was clearly better than IE, but Edge would crash my phone, or become non responsive, or both so often (creators update on Lumia 640 LTE). If the browser doesn't work, and there are no apps, it doesn't make sense to have the phone.

I don't understand why Microsoft has keep IE/Edge around. It's just embarrassing. Event my technology illiterate friends and family rag on IE and everyone installs chrome these days. If they spend less time building IE and focused on other platforms they'd waste a lot less time for everyone including themselves.

They need something built into the OS that supports HTML/HTML5, its what a lot of system interfaces and apps especially internet based ones like to be build from.

Plus how would you download another windows browser - it would have to be in the app store first lol.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#702

Post by zyme »

pxeboot wrote: post #579
IgorPartola wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would have happened if they competed on pure price. Like if they basically gave away 10m devices. That’s a small amount but it could have kickstarted something. App developers have to choose which platforms to support. The cost is nearly doubled if you go from just one to both dominant platforms. Adding a third would nearly triple it. It is not worth it if suddenly you can reach a whole lot of people. G…

They practically did. I bought a Windows phone for $30 a couple years ago.

That's how much my mom's Lumia 640-LTE cost a few years ago - I think right after it was first released. Such a good price for the hardware if only it could run something useful, the latest 10 Mobile build does count...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#703

Post by zyme »

collinmanderson wrote: post #475
criddell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything? I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don…

Exactly. Microsoft is abandoning phone, but I imagine they'll still exist in the business-tablet area.

They Brought back WinRT, or rather this month's new Desktop RTM build has an ARM64 version. It'll probably run low-power low-cost tablet/phablets, maybe even be put on a phone if 10 starts seeing more metro apps at some date.

I mean that capability is where the desktop version of windows keeps getting more features matching; each version of Phone and Desktop have been more and more like each-other.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#704

Post by roryisok »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #697
roryisok wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use a WP handset as my legit phone and will probably continue to do so until they're just not usable anymore for whatever reason. Would love to get my hands on a 1020, but I should probably just go buy one second hand. I'm in europe so yours probably wouldn't even work over here

It's GSM (AT&T). I'm willing to trade. Got anything interesting?

mostly just other windows phones with cracked screens I'm afraid. Want an Apple Magic Trackpad and Wireless Keyboard?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#705

Post by RaleyField »

JohnBooty wrote: post #607
usrusr wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet theory is that this is because the dev tools department at Microsoft is not a pure cost centre with the sole task of improving the platform, they have Visual Studio licenses to sell. If there is any truth in that, we should see a slow decline in "API of the year" as non-subscription licenses (where customers are prone to skip an update when it does not have enough "revolutionary must-haves") are slowly phased…

My pet theory is that this is because the dev tools department at Microsoft is not a pure cost centre with the sole task of improving the platform, they have Visual Studio licenses to sell. This is the single most baffling thing about Windows to me, and it always has been. Why insist on trying to sell Visual Studio licenses, instead of maximizing the amount of software written for your platform(s)? It doesn't even se…

> Why insist on trying to sell Visual Studio licenses, instead of maximizing the amount of software written for your platform(s)?

For a while now they haven't been doing that. Community editions are just as good as paid ones and before that Express versions were still comparable if not better than open source IDEs.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#707

Post by WorldMaker »

maxxxxx wrote: post #681
WorldMaker wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that .NET Core is almost the same .NET runtime/framework (little-f) that powers UWP. It's been a huge hurdle across the board, web and desktop alike. I'm sure if the .NET team had had a magic wand to shrink the .NET Framework (cap-f) down to a smaller size and remove all the legacy Win32 code without breaking so much compatibility they would have. It's easy to say in hindsight that they should have tried…

But again they have no upgrade path. They just produce something new and expect everyone to jump on board. My expectation is that UWP will last 2-3 years and then they will have something else that does the same but in a different way and UWP is in maintenance mode.

You may be confused. .NET Standard 2.0 support for UWP means the upgrade path is (finally) here today. Start a UWP project in VS 2017.4, make sure the project targets the Fall Creator's Update (the Windows 10 feature update to be released at the end of this month), and from that UWP app you can now add a reference to almost anything on NuGet you want. .NET Standard 2.0 support means that if it ran on the .NET Framework 4.x, it likely runs on UWP now (with rarer but obvious exceptions like using old WPF or WinForms libraries, some of which will still "work" as no-ops not actually doing anything).

Again, I'm not sure how much clearer of an upgrade path you could want? If you have a WPF app today, everything but the XAML will work in Fall Creators Update UWP. The XAML may even be trivial to convert to UWP XAML, they are related like family.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#708

Post by asveikau »

dpark wrote: post #415
garganzol wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I looked for Windows Phone device with a decent audio output so I could enjoy my lossless paid subscription to services like Tidal. I wasn't able to select a Windows Phone. There were several models but none of it made an explicit accent on sound quality. As a last resort I looked to external DACs and it turned out that Windows Phone didn't support them either. I just went and bought a second hand iPhon…

The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small. I’m pretty sure that losing that market wasn’t what doomed Windows Phone. Regardless, my point wasn’t that the hardware was perfect for everyone or every use case. The point was that there were premium Windows Phone devices before the 950 showed up. The 950 arrived after the end state for Windows Phone was pretty obvious.

> The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small.

The point is that everybody is a different niche. If you start this attitude that feature X is uncommon and not worth the effort, then you do that for a thousand feature X's, eventually you make a product for no one and since you can't predict what niche feature X will suddenly become more important later, the future doesn't happen on your platform.

I have talked to far too many people at MS who have exactly this dismissive attitude about every single feature.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#709

Post by bitmapbrother »

roryisok wrote: post #666
bitmapbrother wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, you have it all wrong. They reversed engineered the YouTube API's and then suppressed YouTube ads. They deserved what they got for doing something that stupid and not thinking Google wouldn't find out.

have you got a link to the original story? I really thought they were following the T&Cs and then those T&Cs were changed within days

https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#710

Post by jhasse »

pjmlp wrote: post #322
jhasse wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what would have been an incentive for me (and I guess thousand of other game devs) to support windows phone? Support for OpenGL ES.

So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS? Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP.

> So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS?

No, I will continue using OpenGL ES.

Anyway: Apple can afford pushing it's own API due to market share, Microsoft could not.

> Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP.

I know, but it didn't support a feature I needed at the time and also it was quite a hassle. Together with the non-GCC/Clang compiler it was just too much.

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