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Windows Phone Market Share Sinks Below 1 Percent (theverge.com)
Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge: Worldwide smartphone sales increased by nearly 4 percent in the recent quarter, but Microsoft's Windows Phone OS failed to capitalize on the growth and dropped below 1 percent market share. Gartner's latest smartphone sales report provides the latest proof of the obvious: Windows Phone is dead. Gartner estimates that nearly 2.4 million Windows Phones were sold in the latest quarter, around 0.7 percent market share overall. That's a decrease from the 2.5 percent market share of Windows Phone back in Q1 2015.
Most android phones are outdated, can't be patched, are security nightmares, and overall suck. Short of buying a nexus (which nobody does)....not so much. Even my old iPhone 5 is still kicking ass and taking names on the buttfuckingly latest firmware.
In my work, I use iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile 10 (and before that Windows Phone 8.x). Windows felt like it made the best use of the hardware. Even a sub-$50 Windows phone ran smoother and had better battery life than a $400 Android. The Visual Studio development environment is light years ahead of Xcode, Eclipse, and Android Studio (imo of course).
But the first-mover advantage of iOS and Android was too much to overcome (yes I am ignoring Windows Mobile 6.x and earlier because that was an totally different era and was not any competition).
I guess Android won the handheld battle just like Windows won the desktop battle.
And iOS plays second fiddle to Android just like Mac OS does to Windows -- in market share at least, not necessarily profits.
EVERYONE, including Nokia, knew this.
No, that's the biggest symptom. But Android was new once too. It got past that because it was the most open platform available. Open is better for developers because the barriers to entry are lower. Open is better for buyers because all the competition keeps their prices lower.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone is that they are trying to fight an established competitor with no new genre-busting capabilities and a less Open product.
I currently have a Nokia 920 running Windows Phone 10 insider.
It has been working like a champ for a long time. I think the Windows mobile UI is very elegant and not prone to clutter.
I have thought about going to Google or Apple but neither choice appeals to me very much. As long as the phone continues to work I will keep it. However, my next phone... I don't know... perhaps Ubuntu...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
> if you are selling eight million of something per year you can probably keep doing that indefinitely if you wish.
Not when you're spending BILLIONS and selling MILLIONS. Just Nokia alone cost Microsoft $7.9 billion. They officially asmitted that 95% of that was wasted money when they took a $7.6 billion charge against their assets. The total cost of their mobile efforts is of course a lot higher. When you spend $30 million to make a few million back, you're in trouble.
I had a flip phone for a long time. A simple tracphone that was indestructable. I still have it in a drawer but sadly I was seduced by a quadcore arm processor with a 1080p screen and 4g LTE data. I stuck a 64gb card in it and I have endless entertainment everywhere I go. I can sit for hours now in a hospital emergency waiting room and never be bored. Fuck, I hardly ever call anyone, it's a portable computer that makes calls occasionally.
You bought a GOOGLE product because of MICROSOFT's history of abandoning projects?? Are you from an alternate, bizarro universe, by any chance? In this plane of existence, MS is known for supporting it's products for very long times, and Google is known for dumping projects with alarming frequency and rapidity.
I don't respond to AC's.
Right but where ecosystems are concerned its really all about the size of the pie slice.
If the ecosystem is highly fractured and you are a developer you will want to write the most cross platform-least-common-denominator thing you can so that you have a broad enough customer base to make it worth the time.
When the ecosystem gets a down to a few players you start doing a version for each. When one of the "big three" is only a percentage or so, well you have enough revenue for the next big two that your probably just ignore that part of the market. Its a death spiral situation, from there on out. Application developers stop supplying for the also ran people quite buying them, the market segment gets smaller still, more devs end support/supply....
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html