The writing has been on the wall for Windows Phone for a very long time. It had long struggled to achieve more than one or two percentage points of market share; Microsoft wrote-off its Nokia hardware business in 2015; the company exited the consumer market in May; and even Bill Gates recently admitted he’d switched to an Android phone …
The company had done everything but officially admit it was all over – and it’s now effectively done this in a tweet yesterday by the head of Microsoft’s mobile business, Joe Belfiore.
Of course we’ll continue to support the platform.. bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features/hw aren’t the focus. :-(
Belfiore still couldn’t quite bring himself to actually use the word ‘discontinued,’ but that’s effectively what the tweet says.
He admitted that there were so few Windows Phone users that developers wouldn’t even support the platform if Microsoft paid them to do so – or even wrote the Windows version of their apps for them!
We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money.. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest. ☹️ https://t.co/ePsySxR3LB
— Joe Belfiore (@joebelfiore) October 8, 2017
Even Belfiore himself used an iPhone during a sabbatical, though the official line then was that this was competitor research.
Back in August, the New York Police Department announced that it was scrapping 36,000 Windows Phones after just two years, replacing them with iPhones.
Via CNET
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