And how exactly does support for a niche technology cause Windows Phone to be so far behind?
You could say that the OP picked a bad example but, in reality, it's quite an accurate picture of how things are with support for WP apps - companies just don't write apps for WP (unless they have their arm twisted or MS or Nokia write it themselves!).
I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen an advert for some company's downloadable app only to find that you can only get it on iPhone, Android or even Blackberry. I'm talking mainstream as well, so high street shops and restaurants, banks garages etc. If a well-known company has an app, you can pretty much bet it'll be on anything other than WP.
I could understand this if the OS had been out for less than a year, but we're at two years now, or thereabouts, and still we're seeing plenty of developers ignoring WP, and others saying they have no plans to develop for WP. I'm not convinced either than things will change with WP8/W8. Plenty of people were saying that the lack of apps wouldn't be a problem once Mango arrived, but nothing much changed there.
I recently bought an iPad 2, and while I'm most certainly not an Apple ******, two things hit me - you can get official apps for most things you can think of, and the OS update support. I know the WP8/7.8 thing has been covered in other threads, and I understand the Kernal change etc, but it wasn't lost on me that my 18 month old, second gen iPad gets iOS 6 (and runs just fine), but my 6 month old Lumia 900 won't get WP8, and yet it was MS that originally made a big thing about no fragmentation with their platform.
Anyway, I realise that's a different subject. I guess my point in all of this is that we're all fairly agreed on the fact that devs wont make apps for a platform that has such a low market share, but it almost seems like many companies have no interest in WP whatsoever, regardless of user numbers. How does MS go about changing that?