Windows Phone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Windows Phone launched in October 2010 as Microsoft's bold attempt to reinvent what a smartphone could be. Gone was the stylus-driven interface of Windows Mobile. In its place stood Live Tiles, a grid of dynamic, updating squares that showed unread emails, weather conditions, and social feeds at a glance. The new platform borrowed its visual identity from the Metro design language, the same aesthetic that had already shaped the Zune HD music player.

  For a moment, the numbers looked promising. Analysts at IDC forecast that Windows Phone would surpass the iPhone by 2015. Nokia's CEO and Microsoft's CEO stood together in London in February 2011 and declared a new three-horse race in mobile. And yet by 2016, Windows Phone commanded just 1% of the global smartphone market. Microsoft had written off $7.6 billion on Nokia hardware and laid off the entire Microsoft Mobile staff.

  How did a platform with a major corporate backer, a design critics praised as fresh and original, and a flagship hardware partner commanding much of the world's emerging markets, collapse so completely? The story of Windows Phone runs through cancelled codenames, a kernel swap that left millions of users behind, a Snapchat petition that reached 43,000 signatures, and a New York City police department that eventually threw 36,000 devices in the bin.

• 2. Photon and the Rebuild

  ›

  Work on a significant Windows Mobile overhaul may have started as early as 2004 under the internal codename "Photon", but the project stalled and was ultimately cancelled. Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile team in 2008 and began work on something genuinely new. The target was a 2009 release under the Windows Phone name, but delays forced the company to ship Windows Mobile 6.5 as a stopgap while the real successor was still being built.

  The pace of development that followed was fast enough to leave real gaps. One of the most consequential was backward compatibility. Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Developer Experience, told the trade publication eWeek that with more time and resources the team might have managed some degree of compatibility with existing Windows Mobile applications. The move to capacitive touchscreens, away from the stylus, and specific hardware choices for the Windows Phone 7 experience made breaking compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5 unavoidable, according to Terry Myerson, corporate VP of Windows Phone engineering.

  From the platform's first day until at least 2015, Joe Belfiore served as the public face of Windows Phone's development and led its initiatives. The product that finally reached consumers in November 2010 was built for them specifically, not for the enterprise networks that had defined Windows Mobile's audience.

• 3. Nokia and the Three-Horse Race

  ›

  On the 11th of February 2011, Steve Ballmer and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop took the stage at a press event in London and announced that Windows Phone would become the primary smartphone platform for Nokia, replacing Symbian. Elop framed the choice in a single word: differentiation. Entering the Android ecosystem late, he said, would have made it hard for Nokia to stand apart. Elop also brought personal familiarity with Microsoft from his time as a top executive there before taking the Nokia job.

  The partnership involved funds changing hands for royalties, marketing, and revenue sharing, which Microsoft later described as measured in billions of dollars. Practically, Bing would power search on Nokia devices, Nokia Maps would integrate with Bing Maps, and Nokia's Ovi store would merge with the Windows Phone Store. Jo Harlow, whom Elop chose to run Nokia's smartphone business, restructured her team to mirror the organisation led by Microsoft's VP of Windows Phone, Terry Myerson.

  The first Nokia Lumia phones, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, were announced at Nokia World 2011 in October of that year. The Lumia 900 followed at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2012, featuring a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display, a 1.4 GHz processor, and 16 GB of storage; it landed on AT&T in the United States on the 8th of April 2012. By 2013, Nokia's Lumia 520 in particular had come to represent the majority of all Windows Phone devices sold worldwide.

  On the 2nd of September 2013, Microsoft announced it would acquire Nokia's mobile phone division outright. Regulatory approval across all major markets cleared in April 2014, and Nokia's hardware arm became a Microsoft subsidiary named Microsoft Mobile, with Elop staying on to lead its devices operation.

• 4. The Kernel Break

  ›

  Windows Phone 7 launched on a foundation built from Windows CE. When Microsoft released Windows Phone 8 on the 29th of October 2012, it pulled that foundation out entirely and replaced it with the Windows NT kernel, the same engine powering desktop versions of Windows, with a large share of internal components carried over from Windows 8. The change was significant enough that no existing Windows Phone 7 device could be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, a direct result of hardware limitations.

  Microsoft offered Windows Phone 7.8 in 2013 as a partial bridge, delivering some of the visual interface features from Windows Phone 8 to owners of older devices. Apps built for Windows Phone 7 would still run on Windows Phone 8, preserving the developer ecosystem even as the underlying architecture changed completely.

  Windows 10 Mobile, announced on the 21st of January 2015, carried the integration effort further. Devices could connect to an external display or docking station and render a desktop-like interface with support for keyboard and mouse input. Microsoft developed a middleware layer called Windows Bridge to allow apps written in iOS Objective-C or Android C++ and Java to be ported to the platform with limited code changes.

• 5. The App Gap and Decline

  ›

  By the third quarter of 2013, an average of 21% of mobile developers were using the Windows Phone platform, and another 35% said they were interested. The market share numbers that year were the platform's high point: Gartner put Windows Phone at 3.6% of the worldwide smartphone market in Q3 2013, up 123% from the same quarter the year before. In Europe, Kantar's October 2013 report credited Windows Phone with 10.2% of all smartphone sales.

  Snapchat became the public symbol of what was going wrong. In November 2014, Snapchat announced it would crack down on third-party apps for its service. Microsoft was forced to pull third-party Snapchat clients, including the widely used 6snap, from the Windows Phone Store the following month. Snapchat never released an official app for the platform. A petition from users demanding one collected 43,000 signatures in 2015.

  Google blocked Microsoft's own YouTube app twice for violating its terms of service, objecting to the app's capacity to download videos and skip advertisements. The app returned in October 2013 but with many features stripped away. By 2014 and 2015, high-profile apps including American Airlines, NBC, and Pinterest were discontinued on the platform. IDC reported that Windows Phone market share, having peaked at 3.4% in 2013, had already fallen to 2.5% by the second quarter of 2014.

  Nokia's own vice president publicly expressed frustration at the shortage of applications, a problem that cut directly into the commercial prospects of Microsoft's largest hardware partner. In August 2014, Huawei announced it was dropping Windows Phone support altogether, citing low sales.

• 6. The Final Write-Off

  ›

  Microsoft laid off the Microsoft Mobile workforce in 2016, the year the platform's market share sank to 1%. The company simultaneously wrote off $7.6 billion on the Nokia hardware assets it had acquired for just over $7 billion two years earlier. Rather than continue competing directly in the device market, Microsoft pivoted to building software and deep integrations for Android and iOS instead.

  Active development of Windows 10 Mobile ceased in 2017. The platform reached its official end of life on the 14th of January 2020, the date after which no further updates were issued. In August 2017, the New York Police Department ordered Apple iPhone devices to replace its fleet of 36,000 Lumia 830 and Lumia 640 XL handsets, citing Microsoft's end of support for Windows Phone 8.1 on the 11th of July 2017 and the platform's negligible market share as the deciding factors.

  The Metro design language that Windows Phone introduced, with its Live Tiles and dark default theme optimised for OLED screens, had already migrated to Windows 8 on the desktop long before the mobile platform closed. That visual language outlived the operating system that first brought it to a phone screen.