A month in, will this work for me?

[tecollins]

I bought a Lumia 530 about a month ago now on the TMobile $30 plan (US) and have been trying to make WP work for me as a daily driver. I've wanted to try a Windows phone for years now, but on Sprint... that just wasn't easy. So I'm tied in with a good many Google services and have figured out what I can find workarounds for (GoogleVoice push notifications) and won't (have not found anything that works decently for Google music) Cloudmuzik won't even open on my phone anymore, stuck on loading then never opens and goes back to home screen, not that it worked well to begin with. That isn't a huge issue though, XBox music has the main feature that Spotify doesn't (local library integration i.e. the OneDrive solution) but I'm not going to switch until I've determined that I'm all in on WP. The user experience on the 530 has been pretty terrible to be honest and I don't know if this is indicative of subpar hardware or if the OS is buggy? I regularly have to restart my phone to get apps to work, and sometimes they just don't. I'm not a big app person, but I need the things that I use my phone for, to work well or this can't happen. I really want this to work restarting my phone 5 or 6 times a day isn't going to suffice for me. As far as apps go, this universal app thing coming with mobile 10... are we likely to see a mass porting of apps over to WP?

 

[Zulfigar]

You might have gotten a bad device if you have to restart 5-6 times a day, because that isn't normal behavior for any phone.

As for Windows 10's universal apps, yeah, when everything begins, you're going to see a large number of apps being ported to Windows 10, both PC and mobile.

 

[Laura Knotek]

We really have no idea how many developers will port apps when Windows 10 Mobile is released.

However, you mentioned Google apps. It is most likely that Google will ignore Windows 10 Mobile. I wouldn't get my hopes up to get Google apps.

 

[tecollins]

Thank you both for the advice. I meant over all app developers though. I don't mind (I'd actually prefer it tbh) moving away from Google services where I can. I just need to be sure that I'm going to be happy with my decision, and so far, this phone hasn't instilled me with the confidence that I had hoped for. I spent my first few weeks with it trying to find workarounds for google voice and music... but I've given up on that. I need a music streaming service with the ability to add in music from my library that the don't exist in streaming services currently (Tool being a good example), and a very good podcast app. I'll be keeping my One Max for chromecasting in the house, and am satisfied with my solution to get push notifications from google voice (aVoice push). Beyond that its just a matter of what phone to buy, and shopping is always the fun part. So... having to restart the phone often, apps timing out eventually, and my current problem where I can't get anythign to install from the windows store are not typical issues that I should come to expect?