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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.
OK, now I want one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'd rather be ass-raped with a dildo covered in fish hooks than use Windows on my phone.
I admire your resolve. But given a choice between the two, Windows phone sounds pretty good to me.
You turned your flagship OS into the worst interface so you'd have UI compatibility for that 1% of the phone market. Good job MS.
I had a Nokia 920, then a 1520, both running Win Phone 8. For the state of things at the time, they were promising and, honestly, great. More stable than Android at the time (that's anecdotal, but my wife had an Android phone and it seemed to have more issues than my phone did), and was far more customizable than an unrooted iPhone (LiveTiles really is a great idea, IMO). Sadly, the combined hardware-software improvement that came in the move from Phone 7 to Phone 8 was a one-time event, apparently.
As I waited in anticipation for what I hoped would be some ground-breaking software innovations in 10 and fun/useful hardware features to give them life, I was at first in denial, then dismayed, next angry, and finally in acceptance (the ecosystem is diseased, after all) that MS entirely dropped the ball and screwed it all up. I'm no fanboy, but I really did hope for a strong third alternative. Once it was clear that my 1520 wasn't going to physically survive the last time I dropped it, I moved to a Nexus 6P, and I've been very pleased with the experience six months in.
So long, MS - it's your fault that you lost someone who was willing to be a loyal customer if you had shown some competence in the mobile area. I work in IT for a hospital, and can report there were four other people in the department who owned one a year ago, and don't today, so I'm willing to lay odds that you've lost not one, but five. I suspect that 2 million and change will continue to slip downward.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
We know that the NT kernel developed by Dave Cutler has a POSIX emulation layer. This kernel runs the Windows app store, and it's perfectly capable of running Dalivk/ART in a variety of configurations - it does so already with Bluestacks and Google's emulators.
Take the NT kernel, and use it to replace Linux, leaving the Android userland as intact as possible.
To this "windroid," add the required javascript execution layers to allow the Windows app store to run on the same platform.
(Re)implement all of the extensions for Dalvik that are provided by Google services.
Reissue Windows phone as a unified Dalvik/Javascript mobile app platform, allowing Play apps to seamlessly move to the Windows store. Maintain enough control over the platform to provide security patches, and "windroid" could fix many update problems that Google seems incapable of addressing.
The NT kernel exists because it was able to mimic ms-dos. It could do so again with Linux.
Maybe this will be the year of Windows on mobile.