Thats not the point here. Its a feature out there, lets users decide whether they want it or not, but the attitude of ms towards their own platform troubles me.
MS isn't going to save its chances in mobile by throwing money at development. The windows store has 700,000 offerings. Google play has 2.8 million. It takes very smart strategy to bridge that gap.
MS has good growth in tablets. Their cloudbook and windows on arm initiatives are designed to break further into budget cellular PCs - Tablets, hybrids and laptops. They have a good shot at that, unlike winning marketshare in mobile. And if they succeed, developers of UWP will come. If that happens, mobile will become a possibility again.
MS is very lucky they have the laptop and desktop market to leverage, and a OS platform that runs brilliantly on tablets (and can do things the others can't there, such as run win32s and Ink). If they didn't have those, they'd have folded win 10 mobile over years ago, like blackberry did with BB10. But because they have, there is still hope for people wanting windows on a phone.
The trouble for you guys, is the strategic route into the phone market for MS, isn't through phones immediately. It's through tablets. When they have a strong tablet marketshare, the apps will be flowing and they can have a competitive offering on some form of pocket device.
In the meantime, mobile for them is more like a long burner, side project. Something they want to keep going, so they can return to, one day. Something they can basically "keep alive".
And, that's more than any other company in this situation would either do, or be able to do. Any other situation, and you'd have no updates, and the windows store would be dying, instead of slowly filling. If this was blackberry, Symbian, ios, android - and the makers had this sort of mobile marketshare, they'd likely have given up long ago.
MS does care about mobile. But it just cannot prioritize it. It has to come after basically everything else, after the software platform, after desktop, after tablets and laptops, after Cortana with bots, after the HoloLens etc. Because it is a part of their plan, I am positive, but it is a part of their plan that is dependant on all those other things.
Things have to come in a certain order, and a certain order of priority. I think if MS is successful in its bid for the budget tablet and laptop markets, we'll see a rise in UWPs. If Cortana with bots is a success, we'll see conversation as a platform take off. Those things in place, you should see a rising interest in pocket devices and wearables again from MS. Because then there will be a thriving ecosystem to support it. And most likely a few new hardware releases will come at exactly that time. But the platform/software itself has to come first, in order for pocket devices to be competitive, and profitable.
In some respects this resembles the pre-ipod years of apple. Where they ran everything lean, focused on future development, market plays, and cut costs, ran core business for profit. Sort of bidding ones time, while putting things in place. They reduced the number of models of mac to just one.
And I am sure that period of time annoyed plenty a mac user (such as those on the abandoned risc platform, or those who felt switching to intel was "selling out" to the enemy). But retrospectively I don't think anyone would regard it as bad for apple, or its consumers. They are now the number one dominant tech company profit wise, and have numerous products.