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Comment by rasvj | Hacker News Reader

You overestimate how many people care about whether something is open or closed source.

I had a Windows Phone. It was bad. Even Microsoft apps were subpar. Skype app was simply unusable. They weren't dogfooding.

Also Google torpedoed it.

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The third party app platform was pretty slow and missing a lot of APIs relative to the others. The first party UI, which got praise from reviewers for being smooth, was written in a different language and framework.

In the first version, the default blank app from Visual Studio's "new project" wizard was slow to load. I think I measured it on the order of 500ms at the time. Not much room for third parties to add more stuff without being slow.

The only question I'd ask is : how many phones should they sell to break even ? Cos if they actually make some profit, that's just fine. Maybe they don't aim to go to mass market. And that's why MSFT may have failed : they tried to fight on Google's ground, head to head. Of course Pine can't do that. So if they just repeat what's been done for Raspberry, that's just great enough to have a living ecosystem.

I personaly just need SMS, voice and a browser. The rest, I can live without it (or program it :-)

In my opinion Windows Phone 8 is still far ahead of Android in terms of usability. It has at least 3 features I wish Google would just copy.

Pretty much all the apps were bad though, I agree. Even the official OneNote app was a joke compared to the Android version.

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