I remember back when Google first introduced ads on YouTube, and it took me a while to realise, because I was using Opera at the time, and they hadn't bothered implementing this "feature" for a...
I remember back when Google first introduced ads on YouTube, and it took me a while to realise, because I was using Opera at the time, and they hadn't bothered implementing this "feature" for a browser with such low market share.
The other big thing that killed Windows Mobile is that Microsoft couldn’t get the story straight when it came to how to develop Windows Mobile apps. They did a total reboot somewhere around 3...
The other big thing that killed Windows Mobile is that Microsoft couldn’t get the story straight when it came to how to develop Windows Mobile apps. They did a total reboot somewhere around 3 times in fairly quick succession, each requiring rewrites of existing apps, and by the third reboot the enthusiasm that third party devs originally had withered. They all jumped ship for iOS and Android because there at least their codebases would remain relevant over time.
As I understand the reason MS did this was due to internal tribalism with teams championing different approaches to SDK design all vying for dominance.
To be fair, you can use any launcher you like with Android. I've been a Nova launcher diehard for years, but there are many alternatives - even a Microsoft one! There used to be one that emulated...
To be fair, you can use any launcher you like with Android. I've been a Nova launcher diehard for years, but there are many alternatives - even a Microsoft one! There used to be one that emulated the Windows Phone but I have no idea if that's still available/maintained.
Hey another Nova user! I don't see many people mention it personally. Every phone I get I give a full week to try and get used to the UI but every time I find myself lacking things Nova has so I...
Hey another Nova user! I don't see many people mention it personally. Every phone I get I give a full week to try and get used to the UI but every time I find myself lacking things Nova has so I go back. It's just such a good customizable launcher.
Long time former nova user here, had to drop it like a pile of shit when that data collection company bought it. As far as I know the ship has been stable so far but I don't trust it anymore with...
Long time former nova user here, had to drop it like a pile of shit when that data collection company bought it. As far as I know the ship has been stable so far but I don't trust it anymore with the level of access it has.
There are exactly 0 open source solutions that come close to its functionality though, which is a bummer.
Almost a decade before that they had windows mobile. It worked great, capable of a surprisingly large chunk of what a modern smartphone does, downloadable apps included (3rd party developers...
Almost a decade before that they had windows mobile. It worked great, capable of a surprisingly large chunk of what a modern smartphone does, downloadable apps included (3rd party developers even).
Thanks to a solid app ecosystem, it was capable of much more than the iPhone was when it launched, despite being released years earlier. In a lot of ways it was what Android would later become.
They basically dropped it, presumably for market share reasons, but I think also because MS didn't understand where mobile was headed until far too late.
If they'd had more foresight, and had been even a little better at marketing, the smartphone race would have looked very different.
It seems your memory of Windows Mobile is a lot more favourable than mine - great in theory but while I got used to it I never ended up actually liking it. I had a Ipaq rx5900 (or one of the...
It seems your memory of Windows Mobile is a lot more favourable than mine - great in theory but while I got used to it I never ended up actually liking it. I had a Ipaq rx5900 (or one of the similar submodels, can't remember exactly) for a couple of years and I remember WM as being a slow crash prone OS with a mismash of interface designs that mostly required a stylus to use with any accuracy, a web browser that destroyed the formatting of most pages, and a fragmented app market.
I don't claim to have a particularly clear memory of it, I don't even remember the device(s) I had windows mobile on. But I do remember it was relatively (in the context of Windows) painless. I'm...
I don't claim to have a particularly clear memory of it, I don't even remember the device(s) I had windows mobile on.
But I do remember it was relatively (in the context of Windows) painless. I'm a technologist though, so I'm sure my experience isn't representative. Probably also the experience was different on different devices. Definitely nothing like what we expect from mobile now of course.
I also remember being initially unimpressed by the release of the iPhone since I'd already had devices that did all of that and more. Apple's genius started to become clear before long of course: They made it simple, accessible and figured out how to teach the masses they wanted it.
To be fair it can't have been an entirely terrible experience - after all I did keep that device for a reasonable amount of time. Generally tolerable I guess but just not with much to really make...
To be fair it can't have been an entirely terrible experience - after all I did keep that device for a reasonable amount of time. Generally tolerable I guess but just not with much to really make me remember it in a favourable light.
I do remember Palm OS more positively - it too was flawed in various ways (as you say expectations for mobile were different) but I liked the T3 I had before the Ipaq.
I think probably one of the biggest things the iPhone brought for most people was a "real" web browser in the form of Safari, which used the same engine as its desktop counterpart and thus was...
I think probably one of the biggest things the iPhone brought for most people was a "real" web browser in the form of Safari, which used the same engine as its desktop counterpart and thus was capable of rendering full websites as opposed to the highly simplified, usually far less capable mobile websites that most handheld internet-connected devices up until that point were limited to.
That certainly wowed me, but not as much as my first time browsing the web on an iPad. With its larger screen and no need to shrink websites down to fit a 4.3" phone screen, that was the first time it really felt as if I was holding the web in my hands.
I had a Lumia 830 and I liked it a lot too, but the software quality definitely went downhill with the Windows 10 Mobile update. I had to reboot every week or so because something leaked memory,...
I had a Lumia 830 and I liked it a lot too, but the software quality definitely went downhill with the Windows 10 Mobile update. I had to reboot every week or so because something leaked memory, which made web browsing feel like you were on the Nintendo DSi browser. Just quitting Edge didn't fix it, it was some OS component. The camera app also had a nasty bug where it would delete the picture if you tried to open the preview too quickly after taking a photo. I learned pretty quick to always wait a second before checking my work :)
I stuck it out until 2019, and then got an iPhone. The Windows Phone was definitely more fun and unique and I really liked the UI, but I run into major iOS bugs less often (certainly not never, though!).
If Microsoft is still interested in getting into the space (and I can't imagine why they wouldn't be), I think Windows Phone has a chance to make a comeback in the next 5 or so years. With ARM...
If Microsoft is still interested in getting into the space (and I can't imagine why they wouldn't be), I think Windows Phone has a chance to make a comeback in the next 5 or so years.
With ARM processors coming around to Windows devices in the next couple years, more developers will be building their apps around ARM. Laptops are obviously the main target now, but Windows tablets might see a surge, and it's only a step further to make suitable UI for phones.
As a mobile app dev, from my perspective the single most important thing Microsoft needs to do if it wants a future attempt at a mobile platform to succeed is to make it a really nice experience...
As a mobile app dev, from my perspective the single most important thing Microsoft needs to do if it wants a future attempt at a mobile platform to succeed is to make it a really nice experience for developers. More devs → more quality apps → more users, it's that simple.
That's always been iOS' strongest point, and is one of the reasons why even now with Android having been the dominant mobile platform for years, iOS still gets new apps first: UIKit (the SDK you use to write apps for iOS) is excellent. It has massive breadth and depth meaning that devs have everything they need to quickly write great apps out of the box, with little need to pull in third party libraries.
Android comes in at a distant second place in this category. Much like their consumer facing products, Android Framework (what one uses to write apps for Android) has suffered greatly from Google's institutional ADHD, with trails of half-baked deprecated APIs strewn about and there being notable gaps in functionality which it's up to the developer to patch up, usually with third party libraries. This has improved some with the recent addition of Jetpack Compose, but even with that developing for Android isn't as nice as developing for iOS is. It's quite messy.
If Microsoft focused on making Windows App SDK great, they'd easily be able to surpass Android in terms of dev experience, and Google would have little defense/recourse unless it underwent significant restructuring. I have doubts that they'd be able to surpass iOS, but matching it is certainly a possibility. Either way taking the crown from the former second place holder is still a notable achievement, and there's plenty of devs out there who'd rather be writing apps for Windows Mobile than for Android if it were a choice.
Yeah I agree. I don't know what Microsoft's track record is with app development on Windows, you would think having been around so long it would be good but I certainly am not in a position to...
Yeah I agree. I don't know what Microsoft's track record is with app development on Windows, you would think having been around so long it would be good but I certainly am not in a position to know.
I think the issue they would have had before that could be mitigated now is that even if you throw a crappy UI together on an app to work on a hypothetical Windows Phone, that's far more useful to a phone user than no app at all.
Not only do devs need a good development environment to help ease the burden of developing apps for a particular platform, they need users on those platforms who will actually use/pay for those apps. So there's a balance here where there is probably going to be users available for Windows on ARM through laptops, tablets etc. (provided Windows does a good job with x86 translation like Apple did with Rosetta), and if the burden to take those apps and churn out even a modestly usable UI is so low that they will do it, then users will be more inclined to buy into Windows Phone. Clearly users suffer through mediocre experiences all the time when there's not a lot of other options, you just need to even have this as an option to be a starting point. From there, hypothetical Windows Phone users with a mediocre experience of usability of apps still means they are there which means devs will have incentives to put more resources into it. But the system just doesn't work if there's no usability at all, it becomes a catch-22 of no users = no developers, no developers = no users.
Not that Microsoft is much better in many ways, but I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't want to use Apple and also don't like Google. Personally I don't mind Apple other than their hardware often gets locked into their ecosystem with minimal compatibility otherwise and thus they try to incentivize you to buy all Apple hardware and services. If you could just take the pieces you wanted and feel like you're getting the full experience rather than a restricted experience unless you buy their other products, then I'd be more inclined to buy some Apple products.
Microsoft having courses where people made shitty "my first apps" and submitted them to the actual Windows Phone app store didn't help the quality of apps. But it did get the number of apps in the...
Microsoft having courses where people made shitty "my first apps" and submitted them to the actual Windows Phone app store didn't help the quality of apps.
I still use my HP Elite X3 to access reddit as Baconit still works. Mostly. The battery life still holds up amazingly to for a six year old smart phone. I probably would have kept on using it as...
I still use my HP Elite X3 to access reddit as Baconit still works. Mostly. The battery life still holds up amazingly to for a six year old smart phone.
I probably would have kept on using it as my primary phone if the camera hadden't stopped focusing a couple of years ago.
Pretty much all of the apps are gimped by the lack of support and the edge browser is not liked by a lot of websites. :(
I hear you. I would pull the trigger on a Pinephone if they had a high end camera. If they had a bigger screen too I'd be happy paying twice the cost of a standard flagship privacy destroyer.
I hear you. I would pull the trigger on a Pinephone if they had a high end camera. If they had a bigger screen too I'd be happy paying twice the cost of a standard flagship privacy destroyer.
A Windows Phone was actually the first smart phone I ever had. It was pretty sick, I wrote an essay on it while I was on a road trip, since it had Word. You could listen to YouTube videos when the...
This makes me miss my windows phone, Such a great OS and the only time I've ever used the word "great" to describe a Microsoft OS, The one thing they did great and they gave it up!
A Windows Phone was actually the first smart phone I ever had. It was pretty sick, I wrote an essay on it while I was on a road trip, since it had Word. You could listen to YouTube videos when the phone was locked (a feature I didn’t know was exclusive to the platform).
It’s honestly my favorite phone I’ve ever had. Even if I’ve ultimately just stuck with iPhones since 2017.
Playing YouTube with the screen off wasn't exclusive to Windows phone, Android phones used to be able to do it too. It wasn't until a while after they implemented YouTube Red that they started...
Playing YouTube with the screen off wasn't exclusive to Windows phone, Android phones used to be able to do it too. It wasn't until a while after they implemented YouTube Red that they started blocking the functionality, in an attempt to get more paid subscribers. That was in like mid 2016.
It's possible they may have disabled the functionality sooner, it's been so long I can't remember exactly when it happened. But I for sure remember in like 2012 or so that my Galaxy S1 could do...
It's possible they may have disabled the functionality sooner, it's been so long I can't remember exactly when it happened. But I for sure remember in like 2012 or so that my Galaxy S1 could do it. Google may have disabled it as early as 2014 in preparation for YouTube Red, but I can't be certain exactly when.
The reason it was still possible on Windows Phone after that was the fact that there was never an official YouTube app for the windows phone. Microsoft's "YouTube app" was just a wrapper for the mobile version of the website, so the limitations Google wrote into their official app never made it over to Microsoft's platform.
What you mean is the Youtube app used to be able to do it, android can still do it perfectly fine. Using Newpipe or revanced over the official app gives much better functionality.
Android phones used to be able to do it too.
What you mean is the Youtube app used to be able to do it, android can still do it perfectly fine. Using Newpipe or revanced over the official app gives much better functionality.
Firefox Mobile will play youtube videos while the phone is locked. And you can install ublock origin on the mobile app as well. Just throwing it out there as another option.
Firefox Mobile will play youtube videos while the phone is locked. And you can install ublock origin on the mobile app as well.
I thought Firefox had to block Youtube videos playing because Google pulled it from the Play Store specifically because it was undermining Google's policy on playing YouTube. This was a few years ago.
I thought Firefox had to block Youtube videos playing because Google pulled it from the Play Store specifically because it was undermining Google's policy on playing YouTube.
I remember back when Google first introduced ads on YouTube, and it took me a while to realise, because I was using Opera at the time, and they hadn't bothered implementing this "feature" for a browser with such low market share.
The other big thing that killed Windows Mobile is that Microsoft couldn’t get the story straight when it came to how to develop Windows Mobile apps. They did a total reboot somewhere around 3 times in fairly quick succession, each requiring rewrites of existing apps, and by the third reboot the enthusiasm that third party devs originally had withered. They all jumped ship for iOS and Android because there at least their codebases would remain relevant over time.
As I understand the reason MS did this was due to internal tribalism with teams championing different approaches to SDK design all vying for dominance.
To be fair, you can use any launcher you like with Android. I've been a Nova launcher diehard for years, but there are many alternatives - even a Microsoft one! There used to be one that emulated the Windows Phone but I have no idea if that's still available/maintained.
Hey another Nova user! I don't see many people mention it personally. Every phone I get I give a full week to try and get used to the UI but every time I find myself lacking things Nova has so I go back. It's just such a good customizable launcher.
Long time former nova user here, had to drop it like a pile of shit when that data collection company bought it. As far as I know the ship has been stable so far but I don't trust it anymore with the level of access it has.
There are exactly 0 open source solutions that come close to its functionality though, which is a bummer.
Almost a decade before that they had windows mobile. It worked great, capable of a surprisingly large chunk of what a modern smartphone does, downloadable apps included (3rd party developers even).
Thanks to a solid app ecosystem, it was capable of much more than the iPhone was when it launched, despite being released years earlier. In a lot of ways it was what Android would later become.
They basically dropped it, presumably for market share reasons, but I think also because MS didn't understand where mobile was headed until far too late.
If they'd had more foresight, and had been even a little better at marketing, the smartphone race would have looked very different.
It seems your memory of Windows Mobile is a lot more favourable than mine - great in theory but while I got used to it I never ended up actually liking it. I had a Ipaq rx5900 (or one of the similar submodels, can't remember exactly) for a couple of years and I remember WM as being a slow crash prone OS with a mismash of interface designs that mostly required a stylus to use with any accuracy, a web browser that destroyed the formatting of most pages, and a fragmented app market.
I don't claim to have a particularly clear memory of it, I don't even remember the device(s) I had windows mobile on.
But I do remember it was relatively (in the context of Windows) painless. I'm a technologist though, so I'm sure my experience isn't representative. Probably also the experience was different on different devices. Definitely nothing like what we expect from mobile now of course.
I also remember being initially unimpressed by the release of the iPhone since I'd already had devices that did all of that and more. Apple's genius started to become clear before long of course: They made it simple, accessible and figured out how to teach the masses they wanted it.
To be fair it can't have been an entirely terrible experience - after all I did keep that device for a reasonable amount of time. Generally tolerable I guess but just not with much to really make me remember it in a favourable light.
I do remember Palm OS more positively - it too was flawed in various ways (as you say expectations for mobile were different) but I liked the T3 I had before the Ipaq.
I think probably one of the biggest things the iPhone brought for most people was a "real" web browser in the form of Safari, which used the same engine as its desktop counterpart and thus was capable of rendering full websites as opposed to the highly simplified, usually far less capable mobile websites that most handheld internet-connected devices up until that point were limited to.
That certainly wowed me, but not as much as my first time browsing the web on an iPad. With its larger screen and no need to shrink websites down to fit a 4.3" phone screen, that was the first time it really felt as if I was holding the web in my hands.
Mobile internet/web, the first time, was indeed magic. Still is really, even if social media going off a cliff taints it.
I had a Lumia 830 and I liked it a lot too, but the software quality definitely went downhill with the Windows 10 Mobile update. I had to reboot every week or so because something leaked memory, which made web browsing feel like you were on the Nintendo DSi browser. Just quitting Edge didn't fix it, it was some OS component. The camera app also had a nasty bug where it would delete the picture if you tried to open the preview too quickly after taking a photo. I learned pretty quick to always wait a second before checking my work :)
I stuck it out until 2019, and then got an iPhone. The Windows Phone was definitely more fun and unique and I really liked the UI, but I run into major iOS bugs less often (certainly not never, though!).
If Microsoft is still interested in getting into the space (and I can't imagine why they wouldn't be), I think Windows Phone has a chance to make a comeback in the next 5 or so years.
With ARM processors coming around to Windows devices in the next couple years, more developers will be building their apps around ARM. Laptops are obviously the main target now, but Windows tablets might see a surge, and it's only a step further to make suitable UI for phones.
As a mobile app dev, from my perspective the single most important thing Microsoft needs to do if it wants a future attempt at a mobile platform to succeed is to make it a really nice experience for developers. More devs → more quality apps → more users, it's that simple.
That's always been iOS' strongest point, and is one of the reasons why even now with Android having been the dominant mobile platform for years, iOS still gets new apps first: UIKit (the SDK you use to write apps for iOS) is excellent. It has massive breadth and depth meaning that devs have everything they need to quickly write great apps out of the box, with little need to pull in third party libraries.
Android comes in at a distant second place in this category. Much like their consumer facing products, Android Framework (what one uses to write apps for Android) has suffered greatly from Google's institutional ADHD, with trails of half-baked deprecated APIs strewn about and there being notable gaps in functionality which it's up to the developer to patch up, usually with third party libraries. This has improved some with the recent addition of Jetpack Compose, but even with that developing for Android isn't as nice as developing for iOS is. It's quite messy.
If Microsoft focused on making Windows App SDK great, they'd easily be able to surpass Android in terms of dev experience, and Google would have little defense/recourse unless it underwent significant restructuring. I have doubts that they'd be able to surpass iOS, but matching it is certainly a possibility. Either way taking the crown from the former second place holder is still a notable achievement, and there's plenty of devs out there who'd rather be writing apps for Windows Mobile than for Android if it were a choice.
Yeah I agree. I don't know what Microsoft's track record is with app development on Windows, you would think having been around so long it would be good but I certainly am not in a position to know.
I think the issue they would have had before that could be mitigated now is that even if you throw a crappy UI together on an app to work on a hypothetical Windows Phone, that's far more useful to a phone user than no app at all.
Not only do devs need a good development environment to help ease the burden of developing apps for a particular platform, they need users on those platforms who will actually use/pay for those apps. So there's a balance here where there is probably going to be users available for Windows on ARM through laptops, tablets etc. (provided Windows does a good job with x86 translation like Apple did with Rosetta), and if the burden to take those apps and churn out even a modestly usable UI is so low that they will do it, then users will be more inclined to buy into Windows Phone. Clearly users suffer through mediocre experiences all the time when there's not a lot of other options, you just need to even have this as an option to be a starting point. From there, hypothetical Windows Phone users with a mediocre experience of usability of apps still means they are there which means devs will have incentives to put more resources into it. But the system just doesn't work if there's no usability at all, it becomes a catch-22 of no users = no developers, no developers = no users.
Not that Microsoft is much better in many ways, but I'm sure there's a lot of people who don't want to use Apple and also don't like Google. Personally I don't mind Apple other than their hardware often gets locked into their ecosystem with minimal compatibility otherwise and thus they try to incentivize you to buy all Apple hardware and services. If you could just take the pieces you wanted and feel like you're getting the full experience rather than a restricted experience unless you buy their other products, then I'd be more inclined to buy some Apple products.
Microsoft having courses where people made shitty "my first apps" and submitted them to the actual Windows Phone app store didn't help the quality of apps.
But it did get the number of apps in the store up
I still use my HP Elite X3 to access reddit as Baconit still works. Mostly. The battery life still holds up amazingly to for a six year old smart phone.
I probably would have kept on using it as my primary phone if the camera hadden't stopped focusing a couple of years ago.
Pretty much all of the apps are gimped by the lack of support and the edge browser is not liked by a lot of websites. :(
I hear you. I would pull the trigger on a Pinephone if they had a high end camera. If they had a bigger screen too I'd be happy paying twice the cost of a standard flagship privacy destroyer.
if anybody is still fighting with ads and doesn't want to do this, this userscript is boss.
A Windows Phone was actually the first smart phone I ever had. It was pretty sick, I wrote an essay on it while I was on a road trip, since it had Word. You could listen to YouTube videos when the phone was locked (a feature I didn’t know was exclusive to the platform).
It’s honestly my favorite phone I’ve ever had. Even if I’ve ultimately just stuck with iPhones since 2017.
Playing YouTube with the screen off wasn't exclusive to Windows phone, Android phones used to be able to do it too. It wasn't until a while after they implemented YouTube Red that they started blocking the functionality, in an attempt to get more paid subscribers. That was in like mid 2016.
Oh. I had Androids from 2015 through 2017 that weren’t able to do that, and I vaguely remember reading something about that being a Windows thing.
It's possible they may have disabled the functionality sooner, it's been so long I can't remember exactly when it happened. But I for sure remember in like 2012 or so that my Galaxy S1 could do it. Google may have disabled it as early as 2014 in preparation for YouTube Red, but I can't be certain exactly when.
The reason it was still possible on Windows Phone after that was the fact that there was never an official YouTube app for the windows phone. Microsoft's "YouTube app" was just a wrapper for the mobile version of the website, so the limitations Google wrote into their official app never made it over to Microsoft's platform.
What you mean is the Youtube app used to be able to do it, android can still do it perfectly fine. Using Newpipe or revanced over the official app gives much better functionality.
Firefox Mobile will play youtube videos while the phone is locked. And you can install ublock origin on the mobile app as well.
Just throwing it out there as another option.
I thought Firefox had to block Youtube videos playing because Google pulled it from the Play Store specifically because it was undermining Google's policy on playing YouTube.
This was a few years ago.
You need to change the default settings but it's quite easy to fix now.
I owned two different Windows Phones and developed applications for it. Such a great operating system, and it was so easy to make apps for!