I'm not sure why they don't just pull the app. They admit that it's bringing them virtually no users and it's a frustrating experience. With only a 1.3% market share (1), what reasons can there be to bother with it?
Funny thing is that the ancient, discontinued Windows Mobile has 2.9% market share, more than twice of that of Windows Phone 7 Mobile Pocket edition, released October 2010 (21 months ago)!
That's inaccurate. HTC had a record-setting quarter with the introduction of the G1 at the end of 2008, and the Dream was also a bestselling device. By the second year Android was outselling iPhone (which had been the fastest selling phone in history up to that point). Android was, by all reasonable measures, an explosive and rapid success. One could argue it took a few months to "take off", but its sales numbers have vastly outpaced Windows Phone, even from the very first months. By the time we were 21 months into the story it was obvious to anybody paying attention that Android was going to be Apple's primary competition in the smart phone market.
Windows Phone is a flop. It may be good (I wouldn't know). But it is demonstrably not popular.
Either it'll eventually take off, or else either Apple or Google will copy all the good ideas and I'll switch back. Either way works for me, frankly.
(Well, no, that's not entirely true. I'd prefer it take off next year and Nokia survives intact, because nobody else is making hardware that isn't hopelessly bland looking.)
What's fantastic about it? I have a new Lumia (I make apps) and it's really not very great. The hardware is nice, but the software... It looks nice at first but it happens to annoy me no end compared to iOS / Android after a while. I still cannot put my finger on it what that is. It's also massively instable for me; someone here told me that must be hardware issues so I had it replaced; same issues. 3 out of 5 times when someone calls me and I decline the phone simply reboots. Two different phones, latest OS version. Metro is very inefficient with screen space (I'm a coder, so 'normal' folk might not care about that) and it feels very awkward and instable; I see the Vodafone logo far too often (which happens after a reboot, if you have Vodafone).
I greatly prefer the look of the tiles to the widgets/apps mismatch on the home page. And the ability to be able to pin so many different things to the home page from inside of apps, instead of going to a separate "add widgets" section, is very useful... I don't have to think about "oh I should see if this app has a widget I can pin."
I've found the Skydrive Office integration to work much better than the Google Docs app Google provided for Android. Faster loading, better controls, and the ability to pin stuff to the start page with ease. OneNote is also the best note management app on a phone I've ever used.
I really like how they did the "people hub" thing of centralizing all the info/connections you have about someone in one place. (Though it's annoying that the messaging app doesn't support FB "messages", just FB "chat", so I also have the FB app installed in case someone sends me one of those.)
The overal design language is great. (For a good example of a third party app getting it, compare the Android Weatherbug app's UI with the WP7 version.)
I really prefer the use of vertical scrolling on the home page to swiping left/right to get to other home pages—I always forgot about stuff that wasn't on the home page with Android, and find a quick flick to scroll down my whole home page a much better way of seeing everything I want in front of me.
And in my case, it's been far more stable than my Evo ever was.
My biggest complaint is that the gmail client isn't as good.
I agree about OneNote; I always liked that. I'll check out weatherbug. Vertical scrolling versus swiping I guess is taste; I find it very annoying to do that quick flick for some reason. But that's just taste.
The email client (the native one; i'm not sure if you mean another one?) is horrible. And that's one of the things I cannot wrap my head around; this is the company who makes the most sold email client/server software in the world right? The native email client is simply buggy and when used as gmail highly instable (I have over 100.000 mails in my inbox; it just crashes randomly). I drank the gmail koolaid and i'm used to it now; I never throw away and I don't use folders. The WP email client really doesn't like that...
Funny thing. The only time my Lumia crashed it was because I really messed up with the app I was developing.
About space inefficience, with Metro I can see at a glance the most important things. You know, less information density -> more focus.
For me, the best features are fluidness (I still see last generation Android phones which are laggy), the live tiles are great to have all the information at a glance, and I really love the Metro design. Also, the deep integration with Twitter and Facebook makes it a really good system.
Yes, I have heard that (stability), but when I invite people over to demonstrate said stability I am able to crash the thing every single time. There are apps in the Windows Market which just crash the entire phone when you start them. That shouldn't even be possible? But yeah this is all blahblah and bullshit unless I can show it; I just have a feeling people are not using there phone. When I have a smartphone I LIVE that thing; I use it for work fulltime instead of a laptop; my android or iphone 4 crashed 0 times (at least I cannot remember it as it has been at least 4-5 years since it happened) doing that while the lumia simply crashes 4-5 times per day. And like I said; we develop apps; we have a lot of Windows, Android and iOS devices in the office; the WP ones are by far (with such an annoying stretch and no-one using them that most clients tell us to forget about devving for them) the most instable to work with and develop on.
>because nobody else is making hardware that isn't hopelessly bland looking
I think the Sony Ericsson lineup from 2011 was quite pretty and managed to differentiate themselves quite well from the bland Android crowd. Even the hit Samsung phones are quite ugly in my opinion.
It's all subjective, though, but I still like my phones small.
Sometimes I think it's best for a developer to take a chance instead of playing it safe because it can bring a greater reward. They chose a platform they enjoyed and which they could get in on the ground floor. As they say, fortune favors the bold.
As an example, if The Omni Group decided to go to Windows instead of NeXTStep, there's a possibility that they would never be successful as they are now.
Explains why they tried, doesn't explain why they are sticking to it, unless they imagine the story, both in terms of market penetration and developer support, is going to get considerably better.
Many analysts believe that WP will see more success which is where it starts (with consumer interest). Many devs put up with Apple's flawed and constantly evolving policies because they believe there is financial success waiting on the other side which isn't entirely untrue.
the Windows Phone platform is going through some churn. With the new Windows 8, apps can share the marketplace so you can target the Windows installed base with your apps too. If you have already spent efforts developing the app, leaving it there seems worth it.
Unless you build an app optimized for small form-factor mobile touchscreen devices, in which case much of the same Windows installed base will find it more convenient to use on their Android and Apple smartphones.
1.3% of ~a billion strong device market can still be a lot of customers in a 13 million target device audience. Not as big as the other players by an order of magnitude, but many folks the size of app dev teams make livings off small town shops serving less than a thousand customers.
I don't know what markets Windows Phone is used in though.
if you look at a device like the Symbol MC50 and think about how much nicer it might be to integrate actual phone service with it, so there may be room in the market for Windows Phone PDT's and the like (the Symbol MC50 is basically a portable data terminal with WIFI capability running Windows Mobile.
(1) http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494