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.

Comments

Re:3rd Party Developers

[T.E.D.]

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.

Re:Get rid of iPhones, too

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:2+ million does not seem like dead...

[DarkOx]

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....