OS was great. Apps ecosystem sucked though, they really needed to have Android apps compatibility mode till they gained enough market share.
We would have three players then, instead of two players and maybe some great devices from players like Nokia.
It annoys me so much that MS failed in this, just like they have failed in premium laptops. One player dominates the premium smartphones and laptops in some markets by a good margin.
While official apps were nonexistant or severely lacking, a guy named Rudy or so made a lot of 6-branded apps that worked better than the originals on Android at the time. The snapchat, instagram etc clients he made were really good. While at the same time the snapchat app for Android constantly crashed and had really bad image quality (a screenshot of the camera seeker or so??). Of course, the apps were simpler then. Mostly images and a feed / chat, not all this AR and advanced filters. Not sure one could compete today without official backing.
But I really do miss some of the apps I had on my Lumia 920. The rebuilding of apps and new thinking about UI made some stellar apps. The HERE maps were so much better than Google Maps still is (and GMaps only gets worse and slower each iteration), and the HERE public transport app (Transit?) had a UI layout and interaction I've never seen anyone else have, but which was really intuitive and nice to use. WP8 also had a reddit reader that's far above anything else I've tried since.
While I never liked the look of the earlier iPhone UI widgets (blue gradient top row with back button etc) at least most of the apps worked consistently at the time. And that was even better with WP8, the way one could almost see the next screen and could swipe etc worked really well. Now however, apps are made with their own design and not made for the OS they run on. So they look the same on iOS and Android, and out of place on both. So I have one way of interacting with Instagram, and then a completely different way of interacting with Google's material apps.
> While official apps were nonexistant or severely lacking, a guy named Rudy or so made a lot of 6-branded apps that worked better than the originals on Android at the time. The snapchat, instagram etc clients he made were really good.
Several of them were taken down. Snapchat notoriously refused to develop for Windows Phone and refused any unofficial client.
Yeah, and around the same time most 3rd party Twitter clients got shafted (on all platforms).
As for Snapchat, someone at my university made accounts that would repost snaps sent to it and some other stuff. It quickly became a huge thing, and a kind of mini social network of stuff happening on campus. As they used Snapchat APIs directly for this they were quickly banned, though. It took years before Snapchat added similar features, but for me those felt DoA and no one uses them. Sad when innovation is quenched. Instead they went on to make their own app, Gobi or something.
Some devs really loved the platform and made fantastic apps for it. I remember really great third party Twitter clients as well, but there is only so much you can do if you are not a first party app. You are not going to be intimated of internal API changes. Limits can be imposed on your apps by the API provider. If I remember correctly there wasn't a good Youtube first party client for a while as well.
> But I really do miss some of the apps I had on my Lumia 920
Was it Lumia 920 itself that had the best camera of that gen? It just feels sad that the Lumia family doesn't exist anymore.
> Now however, apps are made with their own design and not made for the OS they run on.
While great for third party devs, this really sucks. Everything felt as a part of the OS with the really fresh UI.
I didn't end up publishing an app but really loved the developer tooling as well, it was very easy to write apps at that time compared to other platforms. Also, for gaming with things like XNA framework for games which a lot of indie devs were familiar with it would have been a great platform.
It annoys me so much that MS failed in this, just like they have failed in premium laptops
Not sure if they did (literally, I don't know the numbers) but laptops like Dell XPS or Surface Pro are still premium range I think, maybe just not as polished as MBP, and do seem to have quite some market share?
“they really needed to have Android apps compatibility mode till they gained enough market share”
I think Microsoft remembers how that approach worked for OS/2 and Windows compatibility mode.
Developers would think “we don’t need to develop for Windows phone” and users would think “I’ll buy a real android phone and not a phone that emulates it, and lags its software by half a year, and will have bugs”
We would have three players then, instead of two players and maybe some great devices from players like Nokia.
It annoys me so much that MS failed in this, just like they have failed in premium laptops. One player dominates the premium smartphones and laptops in some markets by a good margin.