WP in the global market

[KhawarNadeem]

Does anyone remember this?

Back in 2012 everyone had such high hopes about where WP was going to go. The fact is, WP marketshare had the highest growth with the release of the Lumia x2x series, as it is obvious from this article, because Nokia blew everything out of the water. Beautiful designs and brilliant cameras and phones that targeted every single market segment. One the whole it was a very "Samsung" approach: there is no niche small enough to target. They made a phone for everyone and very consistently. Every phone had unique features like Glance, and camera buttons, and similar designs, and good cameras. They were doing it right.

So what happened? Why are we getting news like this now?

A number of things happened. Microsoft tried to do too many things at once and did none of them right. The acquisition of Nokia, the restructuring of management, and "side projects" like bringing their services to other platforms (such as Office on iPads) took their focus away from Windows Phone. Anyone who reads the forums here knows that the majority is deeply unhappy with this. The distracted MS made nothing great in 2013. Carried locked devices, a 925 mid-year and a 1520 at the end of the year. There was no refresh of all the WP8 devices as there should have been.

So what happens now? We are back to the marketshare of 2 years ago, and all the hard work Nokia did was nothing, and now we are sharing platform exclusives with other ecosystems. All the while waiting for WP10 that won't be here for more than half a year.

I love Windows Phone. My father, sibling, and I own Lumia devices, and we are very happy with them. So this isn't one of those sad posts about bashing WP.

But it's kind of hard not to notice that MS isn't working on expanding anything. HERE Maps and MixRadio, etc. still aren't available in my country (Pakistan), and while it would be unreasonable to ask for services like Cortana, at least supporting navigation apps and Music apps here can't be too difficult? Google does it.

The app gap is not as bad now, but things still aren't changing.

What do you think will help WP grow?

 

[N_LaRUE]

Let's be clear here because you're blurring lines and not realising that some of those things had nothing to do with MS.

Carrier exclusives prior to this year were Nokia, HTC, etc, not MS. The merger with Nokia just finished this year so MS hasn't brought their first phones yet. Yes, MS should have helped with all this but obviously they just wanted to supply the OS and let the OEMs deal with the carriers. We can only hope things will get better.

Next, the HERE suite of apps doesn't belong to MS. They didn't buy it. It's still Nokia's. Nokia still exists so if you want to complain they would be the one.

Yes MS is very slow and Nokia isn't much better. The role out of OS updates and firmware is at a snails pace and it's depressing.

Yes many apps are missing still and not having the mainstream app instead of 3rd party equivalents is in a word, pathetic. Even if the 3rd party is better, it just doesn't look good.

The only hope and I mean the only hope for WP is for W10 to be what changes things. We have to hope that developing for Windows becomes attractive. That's all we can do really. Let's hope for better things next year.

 

[KhawarNadeem]

Yes, you're right about HERE and carrier exclusiveness.

Is the app gap really that bad though? Because I think it's a lot better now. I think it's Microsoft's apps themselves that are lacking, and they're not helping the situation. Like, for example, if Microsoft recommends things like transparent tiles and fast app resume to developers, why can't they implement those things on their own apps like Skype?

Because isn't this kind of like what BlackBerry did? Now that BBM is available on everything, their one solid selling point, safe communication, is really not exclusive to their phones anymore. And Microsoft is doing the same thing, by providing their best to other platforms.

Windows 10 will, again, help with the app gap, as all new releases of WP have been rectifying that. But if the phone refreshes are going to go on like they are going on right now, new apps won't help much. If a customer is getting the EXACT same apps on all platforms, why would they switch from iOS and Android? They're destroying the exclusivity that Nokia brought to WP.

 

[rodan01]

Nokia didn't do anything right in the last two years. From the x2x series the only phone sold in decent quantities was the L520, and to a lesser extend the other cheap models with 512mb of ram. This wasn't Nokia's merit, sales were great because WP runs well in low-end hardware, and Android was awful.

Why did worldwide market share fall sharply in q2?
Probably a mix of factors: people waiting for 8.1 models, Moto G/E and other decent cheap Android devices, KitKat, the growth of the Chinese market where WP doesn't exists.