To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was.
Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
I do miss Windows Phone. The animated tiles meant that a lot of the time you didn't need to switch to the app to get the info you needed (weather conditions, how the market is doing, etc.)
And it was fast I really dislike the pointless animations that iOS and Android go through - since the icons in Windows Phone were rectangles the few animations it did have were quick because they didn't have to worry about clipping arbitrary regions.
I think WP suffered from the problem (among many) that app statistics are based on people actually using them. If no one opens your app, you can't track if they're using it. So now it seems like no one is using your app on Windows Phone. Combine that with WP natively replicating the features of a lot of apps (you didn't need to install Twitter and Facebook because it was built into the People app that shipped with the phone), and it paints a picture of lower user engagement on WP.
There's a perverse incentive on other platforms for app makers to send you notifications that require you to open the app to view. It increases user engagement numbers, because no one really knows how to measure user engagement properly.
I had a Lumia 920 for years. More than being fast, it felt fast. The animations were placed to make all the load times consistent. When you get used to a specific timing, the device always feels right.
My first major phone was a windows phone and I loved it! My favorite was the tile app design. My phone's Bluetooth also had a crazy long range. I could have my phone in one area of the house and use my Bluetooth on the other side.
Strongly agree with this. I got a WP service when WP7 came out and it was a revelation compared to Android. Not just the way it looked, but the hubs concept just made a ton of sense. Future releases ruined both, sadly.
I'd like to believe that in the world of progressive web apps Windows Phone would have had a higher chance of success. Firefox phone tried the same and failed, but with the backing of a huge company like MS... you never know.
I don't think open sourcing it would help much at this point. It's not as if it's impossible to find a Windows phone to use, but the ecosystem is falling apart too.
The biggest problems in my mind for using a Windows phone today are really that what apps there were are going away (which open sourcing the os isn't going to help), and the browser is bad. On Windows phone 8, the browser is bad because the rendering engine of mobile IE isn't very good / workable with modern web; on Windows mobile 10, the browser is bad because Edge frequently delays responding to user input and it's uterly unusable at times. Plus or minus when the browser locks up the phone and the watchdog timer reboots it.
In part, I would imagine, because IIRC they were trying to do the same concept that Apple did about shipping one OS built for desktop/phones with different flags, so that would require opening a large swathe of the Windows source tree.
A lot of the Windows Phone OS is ported from the Windows code at the time (networking stack, libraries, UI) with fixes for multiple architectures (ARM/MIPS), power, and performance.
To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was.
Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.