You still believe W10M be merged again with W10?
Of course. I've never not believed that.
MSFT stated that feature2 was because of work ongoing onecore (and I can understand why they are doing that with WoA coming out, project scorpio, windows s AND the rumoured cshell - unifying the platform across devices is quite a task, especially with a raft of new windows 10 variants coming out).
Splitting development branches is not that uncommon and occurs for a variety of reasons, such as delaying features for user testing. In this case its because of all the changes needed to the central unifying code, due to all that new software it needs to run. Literally how could they NOT put all hands on deck to perfect the onecore code, and put that first in line?
With windows s, and windows on arm, and the console platform, all attracting devs to full UWP (and the software bridges, and new xamarin), and the complete impracticality of WoA ever running on a phone, I can't see why any company in this situation would abandon mobile at this point.
Clearly its 100% full steam ahead with the UWP platform. The whole point of which is to unify devices. I very much doubt MS will give up on telephony based devices, or wearables, or smarthome or machine learning or any other device player in our immediate future. They just want that development base, in order to make it competitive. And strategically that's complicated, practically its a lot of coding and hardware manufacture. It requires an extreme sense of time sensitive priorities, and a careful selection thereof.
If they put win10 mobile first in this instance, it would make no sense at all. Who's going to come to a mobile platform that has less than 1/3 of the apps of competitors? And there's the whole issue of the ongoing battles in domains they do have sway in - notebooks, tablets, consoles AND future techs everyone is battling for VR/AR, machine learning.
Now in history is kind of a key moment for MS. They could make or break.
It's just on a backburner a little because the other pieces have to be in place (mindshare, the surface brand, a novel piece of hardware, the uwp platform itself most importantly - and all the moves that lead to it). It's also because of course, mobile as a cash cow, is about to shrink. Better to be first to the party on something else, than last to the party that's about to become less profitable.
Packing up shop now, especially when its still making and not costing money would be weird. Phones, in some form, will stay around, even if they aren't the investment opportunity they are now. If they quit now, that would baffle me, TBH, commercially. The strategy they are playing right now seems a lot smarter than all that, in a business sense.
I don't think the rejoin to the main branch will be that far off. Redstone 3 development is still early. I don't think win10m will get a lot of feature updates in the FCU though. Given all that's being packed in, it'll likely be entirely trickle down.
Windows 10 mobile IS their mobile platform, well that and IoT core, just like every other branch, it will continue to be developed, when they have the time. If they gave it up, it would be like surrendering the entire objective, the whole vision, their survival and comeback strategy.
Even if they take hits in the hardware market, or marketshare, right now MS pretty much HAVE to believe in the whole onecore, conversation as a platform, mobile first, cloud first, one OS across hardware, UWP, 0d to 3d ;vision. It's sustained progress and momentum that will likely define their success or failure, with such a big and ambitious project.
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