I think I am the only person on the internet who remembers this, but ten years ago Google had some damn good WinCE apps on the old Windows Mobile. The Google Maps was especially good, and saw updates well after iPhone had stolen everybody's hearts and minds. Then MS killed Win32 on mobile in favor of the Silverlight-based SDK for WP7. I always see that as the turning point. I imagine someone at Google seeing this forced rewrite and saying, why waste our time?
Whoever signed off on WP7 sealed Microsoft‘s fate in mobile. Always easy in hindsight but I remember lots of angry articles by developers from back then - the signs were clear.
I wish people would stop repeating this BS. It was an internal ship party for WP employees. Hyperbole and trash-talking is common at such things. As it should be.
> Hyperbole and trash-talking is common at such things.
Where I walk, the only trash talking is about management and how fucking far behind we're lagging re. the competition. Burying the competitor's product is narcissistic and pathetic. Maybe this had been ordered from above.
I often felt they saw Apple being successful while being demanding of app devs, and erroneously thought that it either didn't matter or even more extreme that there was a causal relationship there. They didn't realize the need to counterbalance that arrogant attitude with better execution than they delivered.
By this I mean only the app platform. WP7's built-in UI and apps got lots of praise for being buttery smooth because they weren't using .NET or Silverlight, they had a private ui framework.
I had one too and as I recall, the highest OS one could run on it was WM 6.5, which was a completely different beast than W7+. I remember that the best improvement I made to this HD2 was install an early version of Android on it a few years later.
That lesson was learned. Since two years ago, Microsoft Store can (and does!) have Win32 apps in it. At the most basic level, it can be just a simple download link, so the Store is only used for discovery. But you can also "package" desktop apps so that they can actually be downloaded and installed from the store, as well.
Windows 7 and Vista did not get a ported version of Windows store nor a ported version of uwp apps. While win32 can do both platforms. That was what killed the windows store.
Windows 8 1st edition was just a start menu with a uwp focus, with a desktop as a third class citizen. When win8 start menu with uwp could have been offered as a single app for Windows 7 platform. That would have been a great buzz pavong the way for Windows phone and windows rt.
The strength of windows market-share lies in the backwards compatibility with win32.
Users don't want uwp or whatever new stack MS wants to impose. They want continuous access to their existing purchases of win32 apps. That MS calls win32 'legacy' matters very little.
Win32 lives because there are millenia of man-hours invested into Win32 applications. If one day Win32 would disaapear, they would be not ported to UWP or other framework of the day.
Whey would be ported to the Web. But while Win32 lives, the cheapest path is to maintain them as Win32.
