Thanks!
Old business proverb:
What's promised by word of mouth and what's guaranteed in writing are two different things.
Well said Guytronic! After the debacle of Windows Phone, and the recent plethora of devices, Microsoft have had to move away from the poisoned chalice that was WP. The amount of devices available, and the different variations, needed sorting out. It is a sad fact of life that devices are defunct after a short period. My note 3 was left languishing after 12 months. It took another few months to get Android L, and then we got 5.0.1!! It was full of bugs, and felt as if Samsung just threw it out there to appease us.
MSFT, HAD to do something for Win10Mobile to gain traction. On top of this, OEM's are now on board, and they, obviously, want to sell devices. Those on the insider program with the legacy devices must have reported issues. I can't see MSFT alienating users, without good reason. I saw a post the other day where a guy said that .164 rang fine on his device. There were only a couple of issues. I can't remember what device he had but his 'two' issues were....." It works great on my phone apart from 2 issues, it keeps crashing / locking up, and when I open store, the phone reboots." This was deemed acceptable to this user. If this is acceptable for the legacy devices, then you can see straight away why MSFT pulled the plug. This behaviour is not acceptable. I doubt they took the decision based on one guys experience, but there must have been more than one report.
Personally, I feel it was a brave move by MSFT. It allows for the Mobile team to concentrate on fewer devices, and allow OEM's to carry some of the development burden. The last thing you want is the unhappy kicking off, as they are the ones who garner bad press and a poor vision of MSFT.
As guytronic said, try getting the latest's roms for older devices on android. The only way is custom ROMs. I had a Tesco hudl. Quad core Intel, 3 gig ram, 32gb on board ( basically a pegatron device ) and was stuck on 4.4.4. We got 5.0, which was as buggy as hell, then they dropped it! Mine was 9 months old! Couldn't custom rom because the bootloader was locked and they wouldn't give us the ability to unlock it.
A two year old device is pretty much obsolete in the tech world now. It's sad that these older devices are excluded, but if it doesn't work as predicted, would you throw money at it, or would you push the devices that it does work on?
You can't run a business on emotion. You wouldn't be around for long.