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Comment by ntakasaki | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping for a Windows Phone Twitch app soon. I guess this kills any chances of it given how they refuse to make a Youtube App and even lawyered up a took down a Microsoft made one over a year ago with no sign of an official app still.

There is no place for Windows Phone in Google's ever expanding empire.

Google's Mission Statement: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

They should tack on a ",except on Windows Phone" to that if they wanted to be truthful.

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Windows Phone's market share in the U.S. is at 3.4% (and apparently isn't growing)[0]. Supporting your apps on another platform is expensive, so I imagine that Google doesn't support it because the market and users aren't there (relatively speaking). And, of course, Window's Phone users can still visit the mobile YouTube site, which (while I haven't tested it) I imagine supports Windows Phone fine.

If the market share increased significantly, I'd be surprised if they chose to continue not to support it. But for the time being, their decision makes sense to me.

[0]: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/03/windows-phones-market-share...

Personally on my wp I ever used the youtube site and it works perfectly. I can also have the controls of the streaming with the lockscreen on ( I usually hear some music video from my phone while going to work )

>Supporting your apps on another platform is expensive, so I imagine that Google doesn't support it because the market and users aren't there (relatively speaking)

Nah. It's not that expensive. They want to ignore the Windows market to stick it to Microsoft. The relatively small Windows Phone market makes it possible for them to do that.

To be fair, for what I understand the lawyering up was more about it violating the terms of service and being able to save the videos offline and skip ads. Google can't be expected to support every single native mobile market out there. What is windows phone's market share these days? A few percentage points?

That is still upwards of a 50 million install base. Even Vimeo has had a official app since long, and Microsoft offers to pay for it, so the reasons given by Google don't add up since it's actually hurting the content creators who lose some traffic and ad money from Windows Phone users because of Google's refusal to create an official app with ads. This is clearly about using it's power to take Windows Phone down a notch rather than any financial or rational reasons.

I would agree if they were supporting lots of smaller platforms but just skipping Windows phone. Someone correct me if I am wrong but Google only has serious app support for iOS and Android, correct?

> so the reasons given by Google don't add up

They add up perfectly, though it may be inconvenient for WP users.

You CAN use youtube on WP using the mobile site. You just don't have a native app. They're not denying WP users or content creators anything except a little bit of convenience and battery life.

And as far financial or rational reasons - Microsoft is still extracting patent fees from Android handset makers. It makes a lot of financial sense to hurt them back - so when you come to the negotiation table, you have something to negotiate. Don't you think?

I'm sure Google managers, engineers, and designers are just clamping at the bit to write for a tiny platform.

In reality, if I remember well, Google obliged Microsoft to delete their youtube app because they were not using the html5 public api they give to all devs ( and not respecting the tos the second time). Microsoft answered that at the moment (wp8) they could not use html5 api on their apps without some performance problems and, indeed, you are able to develop native apps with html5/css/js only with the recent 8.1 update.

I think that at this moment Microsoft can again build a youtube app both respecting the TOS and using the html5 public api without performance issues

Google's lack of support for WP is WP's biggest weakness.

I borrowed a Lumina 920 for about a week and really liked it. Well built, cool UI. I especially liked the calender. The lack of native google apps didn't bother me too much. I've got waze to replace gmaps, the lack of a non-sketchy looking gchat app was annoying but that was about it. I can use the services I care through the browser and my email and contacts synced just fine.

The real killer for me was the lack of a keepass app that supports 1.x DBs. If any of y'all are looking for a project, do that! You would have earned my $1!

$1 × how many users? :)

They should better support their customers on Windows Phone and Windows 8. On the other hand there are proxy wars all over the place between the tech giants. This is one. Another one is Microsoft being dicks and extracting Android licensing fees.

What's funny is that I have a Motorola Droid from 2009, the same time at which I could have gotten an iPhone 3GS, and the YouTube App is no longer supported on my Droid. I have my mom's old 3GS and the app runs perfectly.

To be pedantic, if Google's goal is to eliminate Windows Phone altogether, then that would be compatible with their mission statement.

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