"Now that Windows Phone has managed to clobber iOS when it comes to customization without losing its aesthetic charm, it’s time for Apple to step it up"
This sentence really leapt out at me. Are we looking at the same rainbow disaster screen shots? Windows phone looks like a unicorn puked on a phone.
I don't think it give any compelling reason on it's own for iOS to shift.
How can you be sure? Your link only have a few select critics, whose opinion are 99% useless. I wanna know what real users think. My own personal anecdote asking a few people about it is closer to unicorn puke than acclamation. But I don't like anecdotes. Are there are quantitative study with a large sample of users' opinions about how Metro looks? I'd be very interested in one.
There have been many reports here and there about how people like metro. But without such study, anyone saying it looks "good" or "bad" are just worthless anecdotes. Of course it's subjective, what really matters is what the majority of the target audience thinks.
I think you have to use WP7 to get past the "unicorn poop" look.
To you, looking at the screenshots, you see a mess of a UI. My me, looking at the home screen my my WP7 I see my Fiance, my brother, my Mother and my Best friend and it toggles between their picture and their latest Facebook updates.
My phone doesn't look like "unicorn poop" to me. It might to you, though.
I imagine Microsoft has data about what people like/dislike about Metro, and they are doubling down on it so the data is probably leaning in the "good" direction.
I hate the Metro UI. I hate the live tiles,I hate the way text seems to drift off the edge of the screen; I hate the way it looks, and navigating through it annoyed me. I've only ever seen it on a phone, though, so maybe a tablet would improve things.
I'm not a UI expert, so maybe I'm missing something awesome. I am, however, a user of consumer electronics, and as far as that qualifies me to comment, I think it looks like crap and would never buy a Metro UI based product.
Haters gonna hate. Having used (and developed for) Palm, WM6, Symbian, Android and iOS over the years, I find WP7 to be the most joyful, intuitive OS I have ever used.
Have you used WP7 for any amount of time or just seen screenshots? If so, I'm genuinely interested in why you hate it so much. The "text seems to drift" is an excellent UI/Navigation feature, it combines the title of the page AND indicates which tab you are on, rather than having a little row of dots.
I think he/she is talking about the screenshots of the new start screen that accompanied the announcement. Personally, I love the current WP7 and I thought that the new screen ditched a lot of the simplicity and looked very busy and unattractive.
Well you could also say that the iPhone home screen looks like a bin of shiny colored glass children's toys were spilled onto the screen.
This type of criticism doesn't really help, because the vast majority of people seem to think both (metro, and iOS) look fine, if not great. What matters is how usable these phones/OS'es will turn out to be once people start trying them.
Everyone I showed my WP phone to absolutely loved the look of it. Anecdotal evidence, for sure, but I'm of the impression that Metro is more or less universally well-regarded. The OS as a whole is a different story.
I like the visual style and even the home-screen but I am not sold on Metro actually being a good UI toolkit for applications. It may just be the immaturity of the platform at this point. It's just not even in the same ballpark of flexibility/power that you get for 'free' with Cocoa Touch. As a result a lot of the Metro apps I've used are just very basic and lacking features -- or they have to jump through hoops to make a UI workflow for powerful features. If you have any recommendations for Metro apps that are really pushing the limits of the UI framework I'd like to check them out.
It's a matter of taste, really. I disagree with you, but I can't exactly say that you're wrong.
For me, the iOS homescreen is too limiting. All an app can do is show its icon and a number of pending notifications. Android is too far the other way- widgets can be far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that. WP hits a great balance between the two- widgets/tiles are of a fixed size, and the metro aesthetic means that none are too visually invasive.
I have a Windows Phone that I used as my primary phone for a few months before switching back to Android. The third party support wasn't there and the Maps functionality was dire. But I think that it has the best UI of any mobile OS out there right now- it's genuinely a joy to use. Getting Nokia on board looks to solve the issue with maps, and hopefully this codebase synchronisation will result in more third party developers making quality apps.
We'll see. Well, I won't, because my phone won't run WP8...
Android is "too far the other way" because some developers throw everything they have at making a whiz-bang widget? How about just not using that widget instead of using it to cast the platform in a negative light?
Because almost every single widget is that way. I don't know what it is about Android, but it seems to encourage absolutely awful design. Maybe it's because Metro is very specific and sparse that WP is less visually offensive. Maybe it's the design tools available. I have no idea. But the number of Android widgets I've found that look even moderately good can be counted on one hand.
Edit: The mod down is funny. So "almost every" Android widget has "far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that" now? Almost every single one? Because that's what he said. I actually have several Android devices and it is absolutely not true that almost every widget is like that.
And furthermore, who says weather widgets with the sun and clouds and whatever else are silly? There are a lot of people that actually like those widgets and it seems a bit arrogant to condescend their tastes just because you think you know better.
This brand of partisan hate and mod-bombing is why I avoid the comment section on almost every tech site these days.
Don't make me out to be some sort of fanboy- I am an Android user myself. I'm not particularly interested in unduely bashing the platform. But I don't see how you can possible argue against the fact that Android has, far and away, the weakest UI out of iOS, Android and WP. That isn't always the case- the Gmail app, for instance, is fantastic. So is Maps. On the third party side, so is the new beta of Spotify.
But the vast, vast majority of apps are not. And that carries through to widgets as well. As I said, I don't know exactly why that is- poor guidelines on Google's party, bad tools, I don't know. But Android is hugely inconsistent.
The only thing I was arguing against is the completely false claim that "almost all" Android widgets "silly" "attention grabbing" "obtrusive" etc. That is not even remotely true unless I am just the luckiest widget picker in the world. Maybe you are going off the widgets that HTC and Samsung ship with their skins. Yes, those widgets are garrish but it's just like how the TV's in the showroom will be cranked up to maximum brightness and saturation. It looks good in the store next to the other guy (I suppose). The widgets I have downloaded off the market including AK Notepad, Aldiko, Apollo, BTMono, Connectbot, Drive, Dropbox, Elixir, Engadget, Evernote, Flashlight, Google Play Music, gReader, Google Voice, Juice Defender and on and on, none of them have the behavior and appearance you are decrying.
As far as your question of why Android apps look like crap sometimes I would imagine that devs have an easier time making money in the iOS app store so they make a larger effort polishing the apps that they put in there. Some apps are exactly the same between Android and iOS like Pulse. Some apps have a better iOS counterpart like the Engadget app. And of course, some very similar apps have better Android versions like gReader vs. Feedler.
I have devices that run iOS, Android and Windows Phone and for many reasons, I use my Android devices 90 percent of the time and the 10 percent of the time I use the other stuff it has nothing to do with the quality of the apps.
What's wrong with giving developers great capabilities? If bad widgets are made people won't keep them installed. When the occasional true gem comes along it will make the enhanced capabilities worth it. As far as widgets go in general, if you don't like them you can just not install any at all or you can be very selective and only keep the ones that conform to your personal sensibilities and taste. Advocating removing power from developers on a component that is completely optional seems daft.
"Just because I can use a hammer, doesn't mean I can build a house". Android opens up the entire tool box for you and expects you to be a responsible designer. Problem is, not everybody has the skills to do effective UX. Just because it's pretty, doesn't make it usable. This can tarnish the platform experience.
Part of Apple's strength in their walled-garden is that they have created an ecosystem of design. Google tried to do the same, and enforce style guidelines, to no avail. Seems like Microsoft has created a similar ecosystem that encourages usability.
Yeah, the Android experience is so "tarnished" that the OS ships on almost a million phones a day. Did you ever consider the possibility that the majority of consumers have a different opinion of what is useable than you?
The stock android experience is amazing, and there are plenty of outstanding apps for the platform. However, I'm talking about setting and enforcing design standards. Android has yet to do that successfully.
Also, I said "can" tarnish the platform experience, not "will" or "did". Ask a professional designer to compare the general style and branding of the WP, Apple, and Android platforms. They will likely tell you that there is a clear cohesion between Apple apps.
Android ships on an incredible amount of phones because of availability. How many free iPhones do you get on activation? It's a cheap (and good) platform for a carrier and vendors to use. Thus, the volume of Android devices is high. Furthermore, volume shipped has almost nothing to do with usability. How many different vendors have created their own UI for Android?
P.S. I'm not an apple fanboy. I have a Droid X and a Kindle Fire, both rooted and toyed with various ROMs.
It is odd when people hold subjective aesthetic opinion as fact. Personally I prefer ICS, by leaps and bounds, over either iOS and WP8, but that's just my personal taste.
And what accounts for all of the fawning over the Lumia devices? Those things are terribly ugly in my opinion. Subjective opinion again.
I do know that design tools like blend support multiple layout views for different screen shapes and orientations. I can't see how this would be different. Underneath if you write .Net code it'll run on both.
It's very rare that the situation isn't really "develop once, debug everywhere." You might as well promise me a perfect optimizing compiler while we're at it.
And even then, is the GUI actually appropriate for all of your deploy targets? Usually not.
One giant leap for Microsoft that I won't touch with a 5 meter stick because the company has way too much of a treasure chest of influence to ever get my money ever again, and one that I will continuously tell anyone I am related to or friends with never to associate with.
The secure boot nonsense doesn't help. The image of M$ is destroyed, and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6.
Absolutely, they are all massive corporations. They are beyond the scale anyone can reasonably expect a company to act in the interests of their customers.
I'm not saying Microsoft is evil - they are just a massive company, who like Apple is controlled by shareholders and therefor maximizes profit at the expense of everything around them.
I have no idea what is going on with Google. Android 3.0 and the unified privacy plans being closed source seems like a good example of how their benevolence may only be skin deep, but they have acted "better" than the others at some superficial level. They are still absurdly powerful and I would always be hesitant to give them money, because companies like all three can turn around and use that absurd influence to harm consumers.
" and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6."
You can never forgive them for making the absolute best browser on the market at the time it was released? Don't blame Microsoft because there are people out there are still trying to use IE6 today.
I used a WP7 for several months last year. In many ways I really liked it, the UI was pretty slick, live tiles where great, the whole thing was surprisingly polished.
But I now use an iPhone. The reason is lack of quality 3rd party software. The PDF viewer available for WP7 (there was only one) was absolutely abysmal. Very poor UX. And that was all to often the case. Where Android or iOS would have numerous great apps, WP7 would have significantly less and usually all lower quality. Such a shame as the OS itself is pretty nice.
Absolutely agreed. The issue now isn't that the major players aren't in WP, but it's that their apps are absolutely terrible, and obviously barely tested. The Rdio app didn't even play music for months, and the Spotify app is glitchy as hell. So the "100,000 apps" boast is a little hollow.
Apparently that is what Microsoft is trying to solve with the unified core. If the developers have ability to write code one time and target both the phone and the tablet/desktop, it is quite appealing proposition.
The 3rd party app criticism is in my view an outdated one. One year ago would have been premature to make a declaration on the availability of 3rd party apps for the Windows platform since it was still relatively new.
Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence
"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."
That's not evidence, that's just a claim from Microsoft's marketing. The code-sharing doesn't apply to any current desktop applications - it only applies to the hypothetical future Metro-based desktop apps. And it's irrelevant anyways.
You can't expect a user to stick with an incomplete platform when there is viable competition, based solely on promises that the situation will improve. In fact, since Microsoft has announced that current Windows Phone 7 hardware will not run Windows Phone 8, anybody who was counting on their phone getting more useful over time has been proven to be a sucker.
I wouldn't call engineering your entire OS to be able to share code between devices as irrelevant, nor would I characterize it as something that is done for a quick marketing line.
Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?
This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.
You're still missing the point that it's never premature to complain that a shipping mobile platform has too few third-party apps. It doesn't matter whether a platform is brand-new or two years old, having no apps is a real competitive disadvantage that will have the real-world effect of warding off potential customers, and no forward-looking statements about what will happen next year can make the problem go away. The only solution to the problem is to build a large app library. Microsoft may be well-poised to make the problem go away within the next two years, but in the meantime, their mobile offering will be lackluster.
I'm not missing the point. I just disagree that for the next two years their app offerings will be lackluster. And my reason for that disagreement is the fact that they are converging their platform to run on all systems (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and console).
Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.
I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.
Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.
No matter how many different platforms developers can target with a Win8 Metro app, the starting number of third-party apps for that platform is zero. There are no current Windows 7 desktop or phone apps or XBLA apps that will run on a Win8 phone. In some cases, porting will probably be easier than it otherwise would be, but it's still going to take some work.
Any game that already runs on smartphones will need to replace OpenGL ES with DirectX, and any app that currently runs on a Microsoft platform will need to be re-designed to work on a touchscreen, and still probably also re-write the whole GUI to use Metro.
The best that Microsoft can expect with Win8 as they are currently planning is for the first several months of app releases to be hasty ports that get their platform some credibility but don't actually make it look better than the alternatives, with good apps starting to show up by the end of the first year. But there's no way they'll close the gap quickly with anything other than badly-ported apps.
And in the meantime, barring massive bribery/subsidies from Microsoft, the only people who will be buying Windows phones are "early adopters" who just want to play with something different. That crowd isn't big enough to fund direct competition with Android and iOS.
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.
Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.
With the recent WP8 press coverage, it's interesting (from a PR perspective) that many stories complain about WP7 phones not being upgraded. Some tech journalists seem almost angry about it.
I don't know if this will die down or not; that's what eventually happened when Google revealed the Nexus 1 (iirc) wouldn't be upgradable to 4.0. So far, though, this point is significantly distracting from the amazing improvements in '8 - note how the linked article mentions it in the first paragraph, and I've seen at least one mainstream article [0] focused entirely on it.
There must be a lesson about product launches in this. If Microsoft had a good answer for this from the start - by "good", I mean one that satisfied journalists and their readers, and/or made it hard for anyone to stoke outrage - the positive press coverage for WP8 wouldn't have been diluted by this.
The issue is the timing of this. The Nexus One was introduced in Jan 2010, ICS was released in, what, March 2012? Over two years difference. I had a Nexus One at the time, and while I was disappointed, I'd got two years of use (key point here: two years is the typical cellphone contract length) out of my phone. Not so for people who bought a Lumia 900 when it was released in April of this year.
The issue from a PR perpsective is that MS don't seem to be controlling the story here. Will WP8 apps work on 7.8? Sources are totally conflicted. Will 7.8 do multitasking? No-one knows. MS should have been all over this out of the gate- explaining exactly what 7.8 users are getting. Instead everyone is resorting to rumour and assuming the worst.
Good point about the difference in timing! Who knows what info Microsoft has that we don't; but for brand-trust reasons, it seems important to update at least the Lumias to WP8, if at all technically possible.
Letting people assume the worst seems perfectly rational if that worst case is actually true, and 7.8 is just a minor cosmetic upgrade. At least it means there will be some apologists around muddying the waters by claiming that 7.8 will be more significant.
They should have done the upgrade like Apple. Everyone gets the upgrade, but not everyone gets all of the features of the upgrade (e.g. I got iOS 5, but not Siri).
It sounds like they're doing just this in spirit by backporting some features to Windows 7, but calling it Windows 7.8 instead of Windows 8. Marketing mistake?
AFAIK it's a different codebase altogether. One's based on WinCE and the other on Windows8, so it would be misleading to imply that upgrade to 7.5 was based on Win8.
No, it is different. The 3GS still can run the apps designed for iOS6 because the OS support the new APIs. It just lacks of some functions compared to the newer devices. However, the WP7 devices can no more run the apps designed for WP8 which means that the WP7 platform has been abandoned.
There might be a little pro-Apple bias in some of the way these things are reported. We now have millions of iPod touch devices that can't be upgraded to newer versions of iOS. This is also true of older iPhones (3 and below, I believe). Nobody is crying foul over that. Yet. As app developers start, out of necessity and force, dropping support for older versions of iOS things might change.
It's important IMO to consider how long an iOS device can use the latest firmware. Once you cross the 2-3 year barrier most people are looking to upgrade anyway so they don't consider it a big deal vs. not being able to upgrade a 6 week old phone.
EX: iOS 6 comes out this fall and is backward compatible all the way to 3GS phones which came out June 19, 2009, but not 3G which came out July 11, 2008 which they stopped supporting with iOS 4.2.1 on November 22, 2010.
I have an off-contract 3GS that's working fine as a bulky iPod touch for my kid. The older 2G and iPod Touch from 2008 (ie, 4 years ago) won't support iOS6.
However, you can buy WP7 phones right now that will not be able to run the latest OS when WP8 comes out. If I were selling these things (or Nokia), I'd be pretty frustrated about that.
The real foundation for cross-platform code -- from mobile platform to mobile platform -- is whether WP 8 will support OpenGL ES 2.0. The explosion of quality Android games came courtesy of the NDK and ES 2.0, allowing for an almost direct migration of apps from iOS with only minimal I/O changes.
Given that the mobile GPUs are targeted to that, I have to think it will. Having portability between the desktop and mobile is less valuable, really, given that even the most impressive mobile GPU pales compares to a miserable desktop GPU. The limitations would render such an exercise much more prohibitive.
DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together. The idea that I could write one game and sell to all of them would be huge.
DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together.
Aside from the completely different experiences across all of them (both in capabilities of the platform, input methods, etc -- smartphone games tend to be quite unique), from a pure numerical perspective there are what, 55 million or so xboxes sold, and while there are countless PCs, the PC gaming contingent continues to shrink and favours an entirely different type of game.
There are 400 million+ Android devices out there, and 400 million+ iOS devices.
If you're developing a touch/sensor based smartphone app, being able to port it to other smartphones is dramatically more valuable than being able to port it to an entirely different platform.
It is quite possible, that Microsoft move with releasing Windows Phone 7 was just an expensive way to make Nokia buy in. Nokia would not wait for Windows8, if there was no Windows7 Phone . Now they must. And Microsoft probably never looked at Windows Phone 7 as a long-term OS.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThis sentence really leapt out at me. Are we looking at the same rainbow disaster screen shots? Windows phone looks like a unicorn puked on a phone.
I don't think it give any compelling reason on it's own for iOS to shift.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_UI#Response
There have been many reports here and there about how people like metro. But without such study, anyone saying it looks "good" or "bad" are just worthless anecdotes. Of course it's subjective, what really matters is what the majority of the target audience thinks.
To you, looking at the screenshots, you see a mess of a UI. My me, looking at the home screen my my WP7 I see my Fiance, my brother, my Mother and my Best friend and it toggles between their picture and their latest Facebook updates.
My phone doesn't look like "unicorn poop" to me. It might to you, though.
I imagine Microsoft has data about what people like/dislike about Metro, and they are doubling down on it so the data is probably leaning in the "good" direction.
I'm not a UI expert, so maybe I'm missing something awesome. I am, however, a user of consumer electronics, and as far as that qualifies me to comment, I think it looks like crap and would never buy a Metro UI based product.
Have you used WP7 for any amount of time or just seen screenshots? If so, I'm genuinely interested in why you hate it so much. The "text seems to drift" is an excellent UI/Navigation feature, it combines the title of the page AND indicates which tab you are on, rather than having a little row of dots.
This type of criticism doesn't really help, because the vast majority of people seem to think both (metro, and iOS) look fine, if not great. What matters is how usable these phones/OS'es will turn out to be once people start trying them.
I haven't heard anything positive, however, from normal people. Just my experience though.
For me, the iOS homescreen is too limiting. All an app can do is show its icon and a number of pending notifications. Android is too far the other way- widgets can be far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that. WP hits a great balance between the two- widgets/tiles are of a fixed size, and the metro aesthetic means that none are too visually invasive.
I have a Windows Phone that I used as my primary phone for a few months before switching back to Android. The third party support wasn't there and the Maps functionality was dire. But I think that it has the best UI of any mobile OS out there right now- it's genuinely a joy to use. Getting Nokia on board looks to solve the issue with maps, and hopefully this codebase synchronisation will result in more third party developers making quality apps.
We'll see. Well, I won't, because my phone won't run WP8...
Pure unadulterated BS. Carry on.
Edit: The mod down is funny. So "almost every" Android widget has "far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that" now? Almost every single one? Because that's what he said. I actually have several Android devices and it is absolutely not true that almost every widget is like that.
And furthermore, who says weather widgets with the sun and clouds and whatever else are silly? There are a lot of people that actually like those widgets and it seems a bit arrogant to condescend their tastes just because you think you know better.
This brand of partisan hate and mod-bombing is why I avoid the comment section on almost every tech site these days.
But the vast, vast majority of apps are not. And that carries through to widgets as well. As I said, I don't know exactly why that is- poor guidelines on Google's party, bad tools, I don't know. But Android is hugely inconsistent.
As far as your question of why Android apps look like crap sometimes I would imagine that devs have an easier time making money in the iOS app store so they make a larger effort polishing the apps that they put in there. Some apps are exactly the same between Android and iOS like Pulse. Some apps have a better iOS counterpart like the Engadget app. And of course, some very similar apps have better Android versions like gReader vs. Feedler.
I have devices that run iOS, Android and Windows Phone and for many reasons, I use my Android devices 90 percent of the time and the 10 percent of the time I use the other stuff it has nothing to do with the quality of the apps.
Part of Apple's strength in their walled-garden is that they have created an ecosystem of design. Google tried to do the same, and enforce style guidelines, to no avail. Seems like Microsoft has created a similar ecosystem that encourages usability.
Yeah, the Android experience is so "tarnished" that the OS ships on almost a million phones a day. Did you ever consider the possibility that the majority of consumers have a different opinion of what is useable than you?
Also, I said "can" tarnish the platform experience, not "will" or "did". Ask a professional designer to compare the general style and branding of the WP, Apple, and Android platforms. They will likely tell you that there is a clear cohesion between Apple apps.
Android ships on an incredible amount of phones because of availability. How many free iPhones do you get on activation? It's a cheap (and good) platform for a carrier and vendors to use. Thus, the volume of Android devices is high. Furthermore, volume shipped has almost nothing to do with usability. How many different vendors have created their own UI for Android?
P.S. I'm not an apple fanboy. I have a Droid X and a Kindle Fire, both rooted and toyed with various ROMs.
And what accounts for all of the fawning over the Lumia devices? Those things are terribly ugly in my opinion. Subjective opinion again.
And even then, is the GUI actually appropriate for all of your deploy targets? Usually not.
The secure boot nonsense doesn't help. The image of M$ is destroyed, and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6.
Do Apple and Google not also have a "treasure chest of influence"?
I'm not saying Microsoft is evil - they are just a massive company, who like Apple is controlled by shareholders and therefor maximizes profit at the expense of everything around them.
I have no idea what is going on with Google. Android 3.0 and the unified privacy plans being closed source seems like a good example of how their benevolence may only be skin deep, but they have acted "better" than the others at some superficial level. They are still absurdly powerful and I would always be hesitant to give them money, because companies like all three can turn around and use that absurd influence to harm consumers.
You can never forgive them for making the absolute best browser on the market at the time it was released? Don't blame Microsoft because there are people out there are still trying to use IE6 today.
But I now use an iPhone. The reason is lack of quality 3rd party software. The PDF viewer available for WP7 (there was only one) was absolutely abysmal. Very poor UX. And that was all to often the case. Where Android or iOS would have numerous great apps, WP7 would have significantly less and usually all lower quality. Such a shame as the OS itself is pretty nice.
Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence
"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/258094/microso...
You can't expect a user to stick with an incomplete platform when there is viable competition, based solely on promises that the situation will improve. In fact, since Microsoft has announced that current Windows Phone 7 hardware will not run Windows Phone 8, anybody who was counting on their phone getting more useful over time has been proven to be a sucker.
Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?
This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.
Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.
I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.
Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.
Any game that already runs on smartphones will need to replace OpenGL ES with DirectX, and any app that currently runs on a Microsoft platform will need to be re-designed to work on a touchscreen, and still probably also re-write the whole GUI to use Metro.
The best that Microsoft can expect with Win8 as they are currently planning is for the first several months of app releases to be hasty ports that get their platform some credibility but don't actually make it look better than the alternatives, with good apps starting to show up by the end of the first year. But there's no way they'll close the gap quickly with anything other than badly-ported apps.
And in the meantime, barring massive bribery/subsidies from Microsoft, the only people who will be buying Windows phones are "early adopters" who just want to play with something different. That crowd isn't big enough to fund direct competition with Android and iOS.
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.
Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.
I don't know if this will die down or not; that's what eventually happened when Google revealed the Nexus 1 (iirc) wouldn't be upgradable to 4.0. So far, though, this point is significantly distracting from the amazing improvements in '8 - note how the linked article mentions it in the first paragraph, and I've seen at least one mainstream article [0] focused entirely on it.
There must be a lesson about product launches in this. If Microsoft had a good answer for this from the start - by "good", I mean one that satisfied journalists and their readers, and/or made it hard for anyone to stoke outrage - the positive press coverage for WP8 wouldn't have been diluted by this.
[0] http://mashable.com/2012/06/20/no-upgrade-windows-phone-8/
The issue from a PR perpsective is that MS don't seem to be controlling the story here. Will WP8 apps work on 7.8? Sources are totally conflicted. Will 7.8 do multitasking? No-one knows. MS should have been all over this out of the gate- explaining exactly what 7.8 users are getting. Instead everyone is resorting to rumour and assuming the worst.
It sounds like they're doing just this in spirit by backporting some features to Windows 7, but calling it Windows 7.8 instead of Windows 8. Marketing mistake?
EX: iOS 6 comes out this fall and is backward compatible all the way to 3GS phones which came out June 19, 2009, but not 3G which came out July 11, 2008 which they stopped supporting with iOS 4.2.1 on November 22, 2010.
However, you can buy WP7 phones right now that will not be able to run the latest OS when WP8 comes out. If I were selling these things (or Nokia), I'd be pretty frustrated about that.
Why pre-announce? Osbourne effect FTL.
The Lumia 900 came with WP 7.5. And now it's not getting WP8, just some features from it. How is that the same?
Given that the mobile GPUs are targeted to that, I have to think it will. Having portability between the desktop and mobile is less valuable, really, given that even the most impressive mobile GPU pales compares to a miserable desktop GPU. The limitations would render such an exercise much more prohibitive.
DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together. The idea that I could write one game and sell to all of them would be huge.
Aside from the completely different experiences across all of them (both in capabilities of the platform, input methods, etc -- smartphone games tend to be quite unique), from a pure numerical perspective there are what, 55 million or so xboxes sold, and while there are countless PCs, the PC gaming contingent continues to shrink and favours an entirely different type of game.
There are 400 million+ Android devices out there, and 400 million+ iOS devices.
If you're developing a touch/sensor based smartphone app, being able to port it to other smartphones is dramatically more valuable than being able to port it to an entirely different platform.