Originally Posted by Stig:
“Microsoft shot themselves in the foot again. Everyone was waiting for Windows 10 Phone devices, so wouldn't buy the 'old' models.”
There weren't any anyway. They were releasing low budget Lumias, but there were no flagship phones for a very long time. That's the main problem, IMO. Any momentum they thought WP was having was killed by MS not giving a shit about keeping the WP/ potential users interested. I had bought Lumia 1520, which apart from having to be upgraded in a fridge, is an excellent HW IMO, a long time ago and since then there was nothing tempting me. Surelly not L950 and L950XL. And they came a bit late and with an OS that has bugs discoverable in a daily usage.
The app problem is a cyclic one, without apps no users, and without users no apps. Yes, a lot of apps are needed/missed only because of the peer pressure, but that's not a way you can argue with a customer. They want the bloody app and it's available on iOS and Android, so that's 0 for the WM, +1 for one of the other two. MS is trying to do something with UWP universal apps where you (a developer) get the mobile app almost for free, they say, but one has to look at the history of app development for WP. Since WP7 there were more reboots of MS way to write apps than Windows 95 had on a bad day. They were backwards compatible, but one had to keep changing the way to program to use new features etc. Who knows if UWP won't be replaced with something else again. iOS and Android have a stable way to write apps since the beginning.
Microsoft is cool about the W10M, it would seem, they are a software company after all, it's enough if they have their services out there. But telling Samsung to install MS apps on their phones is not enough, I think. They have to have a successful platform of their own to demonstrate the services in their natural habitat, so to speak. And it can be embarrassing if their solutions for other platforms are better, simply because the developers got more resources to implement them and WM10 solution is not a priority.