On a related note, I’m still annoyed microsoft bungled the windows phone and didn’t do more to support app developers. Arguably better than osx and certainly android at the time.
Loved my Windows Phones, I had three of them, and even released an app. I thought the app support, from a technical standpoint, was really good insofar as I could release the same app and have it run perfectly on phones, tablets and desktops. The issue I had with Windows Phones was how they just got steadily worse instead of better. They lost their uniqueness and became closer to Android clones with each iteration, and it was clear Microsoft weren’t fully behind the platform long before the app developers began to leave. Real shame.
They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.
On a related note, I’m still annoyed microsoft bungled the windows phone and didn’t do more to support app developers. Arguably better than osx and certainly android at the time.
Loved my Windows Phones, I had three of them, and even released an app. I thought the app support, from a technical standpoint, was really good insofar as I could release the same app and have it run perfectly on phones, tablets and desktops. The issue I had with Windows Phones was how they just got steadily worse instead of better. They lost their uniqueness and became closer to Android clones with each iteration, and it was clear Microsoft weren’t fully behind the platform long before the app developers began to leave. Real shame.
They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.