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Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus' (engadget.com)
From a report: Microsoft's Joe Belfiore informed Twitter users that new features and hardware for Windows 10 Mobile "aren't the focus" any more. There will be fixes and security patches, of course, but you shouldn't expect more than that. As for why the platform has been all but dropped? The executive boils it down to one main reason: the difficulty of getting developers to write apps. Microsoft tried paying companies to produce apps and even wrote them itself when creators couldn't or wouldn't get involved, but the number of users was "too low for most companies to invest." Why build an app for a relatively small bunch of Windows phone owners when there are many more Android and iOS users? Belfiore himself switched to Android for the "app/[hardware] diversity." It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. You can point to a few other factors in Windows' fate on phones, such as slowness in responding to Apple and Google as well as an inconsistent hardware strategy (you could rarely count on getting a timely sequel to a handset you liked). Whatever the reason, it's safe to say that Microsoft isn't just acknowledging that Android and iOS hold a clear lead -- it's quashing any hopes for a comeback, at least for the foreseeable future.
1. Make phone with shitty UI.
2. Make you bread and butter funtion and look like the hated phone UI. To make people like the phone.
4. Stop making phone.
5. ?
6. Profit.
The issue is that your work requirements are not everyone's work requirements. For example: email and calls. Yes. But I travel sometimes for work which means: At least a browser to book hotels, flights, rental cars. It means cab hailing apps sometimes. It also means a VPN app so I can get access to the company network when I'm on the road.
Now here's where apps help: Airline apps to check-in, book, upgrade, gate information. Hotel apps to check-in/check out, request service, get directions. Car rental apps to avoid the lines. I can do 100% of all those things with a browser and phone calls. It's much faster and more convenient to use apps.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.
You seem to assume apps are just for fun and games. Even our very traditional organization with very limited work needs have added the time tracking and travel expense system as an app (in addition to the desktop version), from what I understand it's quite popular because you can use it for all off-site meetings and stuff and you can fill out your travel expenses as you go. Pay a taxi bill, go to your expense form and type in amount, take a photo of the reciept and done. As opposed to having a stack to process when you get back to the office. Heck, if the last leg is a fixed price like the bus/train from the airport you can be done before you even get home.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Imagine how much sympathy we all have for Microsoft having to face a target market completely locked in by one or two competitors.
To be fair, they saw mobile. What they didn't see was Open Source mobile. According to the standard Microsoft playbook
1. Microsoft would be in mobile - because they 'have' to be in everything, tech wise. But their offerings would have limited appeal - mostly to business execs.
2. iOS would come out and redefine mobile
3. Microsoft would observe iOS and see what it takes to be successful.
4. Microsoft would make a system that works like iOS and sell it to OEM's at low enough prices that they would be the only viable alternative to iOS.
Google short-circuited that plan at step 4, and Android became what Windows mobile would've been. In fact Android's weakness (being Open Source, it was allowed to diverge enough from the 'standard' to make timely upgrades near impossible) was also it's biggest strength (allowing OEM's to attempt to differentiate themselves led to healthy competition and a great deal of innovation). Would there be hundreds of Windows Phone manufacturers, if all those phones had to be essentially the same on the inside? I don't know. Of course, now many of us would like Android phones to be as stock as possible - having witnessed the downside. But in any case, the alternative to iOS has been established, and Microsoft is at least smart enough to understand that now.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
As a Microsoft-stack developer, I never got started on this path. I still, to this day, have WinCE/WinMo/WinEH programs that I have to maintain.
WinCE is still supported until 2020. But development for it got a LOT more difficult under Windows 10, and then EVEN MORE difficult with the 1703 (Creators Update) version of Windows 10. Development for that old-ass platform requires VS2008 (VS2010 broke compatibility with a lot of tools). VS2008 uses ActiveSync/WMDC to deploy code to a test device. (And I have to use a test device because device emulators lack real-world features like barcode imagers and such.) But WMDC support was dropped in 2012.
So when Win10 came out, it broke compatibility with the WMDC application up to and including the version you can download and install from the web... but not the version that had a hotfix to make it work with Windows 8.0 that installs automatically through Windows Update when you plug in a WMDC-able device. The fix was to make sure you NEVER installed WMDC manually, but instead, allowed it to install automatically when you plug in a device.
Oh, but it gets better... When the Creators Update (Win10 r.1703) came out, they made svchost.exe stop hosting things together by default, since, in theory, this makes services more stable and less prone to being taken down by a service in the same host instance. But this broke the services that WMDC uses to communicate with devices through USB. WcesComm and RapiMgr use a common mutex for some reason, which ensures that they either MUST be running under the same svchost.exe instance, or else the late-comer (whichever one starts last) will crash. So to make these work under 1703, you have to add a registry flag to tell SCM to NOT separate them into separate instances of svchost.exe. This makes these processes crashy AF, so you then have to set the "if it crashes more than twice" option to "just restart the stupid POS" in the service properties.
I have yet to be "forced" to adopt any of these newer platforms or frameworks. I have yet to ship even one project with any XAML code. I never touched Silverlight, WP7, WP8, or "Metro". I've dabbled a bit with UWP. (Good job mischaracterizing all of these things completely, though. It's great that you confuse languages, frameworks, platforms, and UI guidelines as all the same thing.) In the near future, I'll probably be "forced" to develop replacements for these WinCE/WinMo/WinEH apps for Android and/or iOS. I'll be using Xamarin, because, honestly, C# is a damned fine language and I just don't want to be bothered writing multiple different apps in multiple different languages, and with a different language on the back-end, too. There's just no good reason to adopt Java or Swift when you already use C# and Xamarin is available.
And in case you didn't notice, Xamarin is the next step in UWP. It will remove the "W".