A developer bets on UWP and loses (article)

It is fine you have a niche community and that is cool. But seriously, their aim was to get X number of users and Y amount of money ... and you didn't. You have to admit that you failed.

anonymous234

@Gurth said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Wouldn’t you need at least seven people to rate it to get 4.9?

Do we still have pedantry badges?

Maciejasjmj

@kt_ said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Which is kinda sad, because it shows lack of consistency and care for developers that Microsoft has been showing lately:

I think Microsoft's entire business strategy to date is to have every amazing idea, then make sure it never takes off.

So far we've had them:

bringing a fully capable Windows to touchscreens (except they pissed off their entire desktop userbase in the process)
resolving the problem of installer hell by providing a unified marketplace (except they never bothered to actually dangle a carrot for the developers to migrate there)
doing the same later on, except with the command line (does anyone even know that OneGet exists? Chocolatey by itself didn't really take off as well as it should either)
letting people run their favourite tablet apps on desktops (except they disjointed them from the desktop completely, making people not bother)
developing a groundbreaking augmented reality device (except it sells for $3000 and only as a devkit)
letting people run ASP.NET on Linux (except they broke so much shit in the process that instead of being a modern, yet mature framework it's just yet another hipster tech, but bloated)
bringing a fully capable Windows to phones (because that worked so well with tablets, not to mention the terrible rollout)
letting people develop Windows Phone apps in conjunction with iOS or Android (except no one wants to bother developing for Windows Phone anyway)
letting people run Linux on their Windows (we'll see how that one goes, but I don't see people tripping over themselves to grab it)
developing an object-oriented CLI with hooks to the entire .NET framework (which CLI aficionados don't care about because it's not bash, and others don't care about because it's CLI)

And probably many, many things I don't remember right now.

AlexMedia

@masonwheeler said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

It's been obvious for years now that "this town ain't big enough for the three of us;" Android and iOS have the mobile market locked down tight, and no one's going to create a third-party ecosystem that achieves non-trivial market share.

Yes, but that's Microsoft's own fault. They completely underestimated the impact that the iPhone and Android devices would have on the smartphone market. While the first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first commercial Android device hit the shelves in 2008, Microsoft didn't release their "iPhone killer OS" until fall 2010. By that time iOS and Android had a tremendous head start.

This could have been made up for if Windows Phone's feature set was up to par, but it wasn't. With the initial release of WP7 you couldn't even copy/paste text, something which was added to iOS in 2009. When Windows Phone finally gained the ability to do copy/pasting in fall 2011, Apple had added a bunch of new features that customers actually wanted. While WP might have other good features, it took them years to implement the things which matter most to consumers.

This is a trend which continues to this very day.

The saga around the devices doesn't help, either. With the initial launch there were a couple of OEMs building devices which ran on Windows Phone. By 2013, Nokia was dominating but there were still other devices. After the 2014 acquisition by Microsoft, other vendors basically stopped making Windows Phones as they would be competing directly against the company which builds their OS.

And in the 2nd half of 2016, things are even worse. The only Lumia device which has been launched this year is the low-end 650, which launched 6 months ago. There are no rumours or stories about any potential new devices, nor about software updates.

It's only been a year since Microsoft was telling everyone and their granny to write UWP apps, but this is pretty pointless. There are very few devices in the marketplace which run Windows Phone 10, and even Microsoft itself seems to be no longer interested in the platform.

Why would anyone even bother to write an UWP app?

* The hardware was decent, but the OS held it back

masonwheeler

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

resolving the problem of installer hell by providing a unified marketplace (except they never bothered to actually dangle a carrot for the developers to migrate there)

What problem would that be?

blakeyrat

@Maciejasjmj

Creating the amazing multimedia library DirectShow, then never bothering to create .net bindings for it even after encouraging all developers to move to .net.

The whole XNA thang.

Maciejasjmj

@masonwheeler That unlike on Linux, where you have apt-get and can install software in a unified way, you have to hunt for an installer on the Web. And the installers themselves range from "I guess it's working" through "crashing on anything that's not clicking 'Next'" all the way up to malware-infested pieces of shit.

@blakeyrat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

The whole XNA thang.

Yeah, that was actually quite good. Shame to see it go.

masonwheeler

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@masonwheeler That unlike on Linux, where you have apt-get and can install software in a unified way, you have to hunt for an installer on the Web. And the installers themselves range from "I guess it's working" through "crashing on anything that's not clicking 'Next'" all the way up to malware-infested pieces of shit.

...because it's not like software that comes from a package manager can give you malware or cause arbitrary code execution, amirite?

FrostCat

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Microsoft didn't release their "iPhone killer OS" until fall 2010. By that time iOS and Android had a tremendous head start.

You, ah, you do know that you could get Windows on a phone in like 2004 or so, right?

sloosecannon

@FrostCat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Microsoft didn't release their "iPhone killer OS" until fall 2010. By that time iOS and Android had a tremendous head start.

You, ah, you do know that you could get Windows on a phone in like 2004 or so, right?

I think his point was that it was more of a "Windows on a phone" rather than a mobile OS.

AlexMedia

@FrostCat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Microsoft didn't release their "iPhone killer OS" until fall 2010. By that time iOS and Android had a tremendous head start.

You, ah, you do know that you could get Windows on a phone in like 2004 or so, right?

You mean the Pocket PC platform? I very well know that it existed, as I have owned a couple of Pocket PC's (E-ten X500, Sony Xperia X1 and an HTC Touch Dual). While the idea was good, the platform itself wasn't as friendly as it should have been (remember the stylus?) and there weren't that many apps.

It was in no way a competitor to the iPhone or Android devices.

kt_

@masonwheeler said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@masonwheeler That unlike on Linux, where you have apt-get and can install software in a unified way, you have to hunt for an installer on the Web. And the installers themselves range from "I guess it's working" through "crashing on anything that's not clicking 'Next'" all the way up to malware-infested pieces of shit.

...because it's not like software that comes from a package manager can give you malware or cause arbitrary code execution, amirite?

It's not about safety, it's about ease of use. It's easier to run apt-get upgrade and get the relatively latest vlc and pidgin and FileZilla and and and.

Plus, although it is possible for a package from package manager to be malware-infested, repositories are curated and thus safer. Sure, they're not **complerely entirely in the most ic way safe, but they're sure as hell safer than hunting down installers on the web.

It's however notable that Linux package managers don't provide malware-infested POS.

Gurth

@cartman82 said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@blakeyrat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@Adynathos I did not say I cared.

Amateur.

More like exactly the opposite.

Gurth

@FrostCat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

You, ah, you do know that you could get Windows on a phone in like 2004 or so, right?

That was back when all the manufacturers still thought that a stylus was required to operate a touchscreen device, and which — it turned out a few years later — was one of the reasons actual people didn’t want such a device.

Grunnen

@AlexMedia Also, this UWP thing should have been in place when they released Windows (Phone) 8. How many developers will they have scared away by releasing a desktop OS with a mobile-like interface and an app store, but without the possibility to just re-compile a phone app as a tablet app? How many more will they have scared away by releasing a new API in Windows (Phone) 8.1, with a bit more possibilities for code sharing but still no complete compatibility, and then releasing yet another API with Windows 10?

And indeed, now that they finally released a decent API for apps that can run everywhere, it's become pointless because there are barely any smartphones left that run Windows.

Buddy

It's easy to point the blame at Microsoft here. I mean, they clearly they fucked up. But even if they had done the needful, in terms of upgrades from 8.1 or the lumia 10 lineup, I'm not convinced appraisin would have ever been able to turn a profit. The way their 'f2p gurus' put it, they would need to average more than one sponsored app download for each incoming user (or maybe a bit less than that; it seems like they were expecting to get incoming users for slightly less than they were selling them for, between their industry connections, 'word of mouth', and owning an advertising network themselves), and I just don't think there are enough people trying to market to the windows platform to make that happen. It's already easy enough to find both of the good apps for Windows 10, you don't need to download a whole new app just to tell you that there aren't any more.

Buddy

Also, I think it was the right decision for Microsoft to block them from the featured and top-rated apps list. I mean, their app only makes sense if they can get enough numbers to bump legitimately good apps off that page, so you have to download their app just to get to see the app that you might have actually wanted to download.

Bulb

@kt_ said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

lack of consistency and care for developers that Microsoft has been showing lately

Not just lately. It is a recurring problem with Microsoft. They oscillate between providing the development tools free and making them rather expensive, for various platforms they have, for quite long.

Bulb

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

This could have been made up for if Windows Phone's feature set was up to par, but it wasn't.

Also don't forget the lack of features on the development side. Since the thing (WP7) lacked the ability to run anything but .NET code (3rd party), it was not feasible to port any substantial applications with significant amount of code, meaning mainly games, because portable code at the time meant C++ (and mostly still does, though there is Xamarin now).

accalia

@masonwheeler said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

resolving the problem of installer hell by providing a unified marketplace (except they never bothered to actually dangle a carrot for the developers to migrate there)

What problem would that be?

- I want application X
- -search for X-
- Fuuuuuck that's a lot of sites offering a download of the installer for X
- which one is the official not malware infested installer?
- I want application X but the oficial installer is bundled with tons of shovelware
- I want to install applications X, Y, and Z.... how can i do that in one command?

Jaloopa

@accalia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

I want to install applications X, Y, and Z.... how can i do that in one command?

ninite.com

accalia

@Jaloopa said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@accalia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

I want to install applications X, Y, and Z.... how can i do that in one command?

ninite.com

chocolatey.org

Jaloopa

@accalia is there a gui option?

accalia

@Jaloopa said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@accalia is there a gui option?

if you insist on being a gui philistine...... actually yes. you8 do have to install it via the command line once though.

choco install chocolateygui

Jaloopa

@accalia meh, I just noticed that Kepass is on ninite and installs from there even though it's blocked from the official site. that means I can stop using the same password for all the RDP connections I need, changing the suffix on each one as the different password expiry policies come up

accalia

@Jaloopa said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Kepass

.... that is truly an unfortunate name of an application.

my brain insists on reading it as keep-ass

Keepass 2.x 2.56.0

Lightweight and easy-to-use password manager.

or if you prefer 1.x

KeePass Classic Password Safe 1.42.0

This version of the popular KeePass password manager is compatible with KeePassX for Linux and OS X.

Jaloopa

@accalia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

.... that is truly an unfortunate name of an application.
my brain insists on reading it as keep-ass

Does the job though.

I may have just accidentally changed my AD password to an unmemorable, random string after forgetting that the login for a particular server is the network one and not specific to that machine. And I may have to put up with that for 24 hours due to the ridiculous password policy of "don't change it twice in a day", which I've never understood. And I may have just reduced my security by writing down said password so I'm able to log in tomorrow and also change it, because the change password screen, sensibly, doesn't allow copying and pasting

accalia

@Jaloopa said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Does the job though.

true. I prefer lastpass, but keepass works just fine too.

blakeyrat

@Gurth said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

That was back when all the manufacturers still thought that a stylus was required to operate a touchscreen device, and which — it turned out a few years later — was one of the reasons actual people didn’t want such a device.

The stylus was for handwriting recognition which every portable device (including Apple's own Newton) thought was hot shit killer-feature.
Touchscreens of the era did require a stylus, as the screens were small, the resolutions were low, and the screens were all resistive.

Apple changed everything by basically giving no shits about point 1, and picking a capacitive screen which mooted point 2. (Until relatively recently, buying a stylus that even worked with a capacitive screen was expensive.)

Matches

@ScholRLEA wrong.

Source: was tmobile with rooted phone before going full no-carrier

Maciejasjmj

@blakeyrat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Until relatively recently, buying a stylus that even worked with a capacitive screen was expensive.

Wouldn't basically any conductor work? Surely it couldn't be that expensive to create a somewhat more polished analogue of a pencil wrapped in tinfoil?

blakeyrat

@Maciejasjmj Considering the alternative is a quick cast of hard plastic any manufacturing facility on Earth could make in 10 minutes.

ScholRLEA

@Matches OK, good to know then. I was holding off on rooting mine in part because I had read that in several places.

HardwareGeek

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@blakeyrat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Until relatively recently, buying a stylus that even worked with a capacitive screen was expensive.

Wouldn't basically any conductor work? Surely it couldn't be that expensive to create a somewhat more polished analogue of a pencil wrapped in tinfoil?

The problem is not the stylus; it's the screen detecting the touch. Capacitance is proportional to area. A fingertip has an area of about 1cm²; a stylus has an area of maybe 1 mm². That's a ratio of 100:1, meaning the screen needs to be 100 times more sensitive to detect the touch. Only recently have the screens — actually, the electronics behind them — been good enough to do that.

slapout1

The sad thing is that Microsoft had such a head start in smartphones. But they just messed around and didn't do anything. I had a Windows Mobile 5 smart phone that I liked, but thought could have been better. I was looking forward to Windows Mobile 6, but then it turned out to be almost the same as 5. The .NET Compact Framework was cool, but limited -- no listbox control (you had to use a listview) made it hard to port programs.

Gurth

@blakeyrat said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

The stylus was for handwriting recognition which every portable device (including Apple's own Newton) thought was hot shit killer-feature.

I used to own a PalmPilot and was pretty impressed with its “handwriting” recognition. (I actually still have it, but it’s kind of hard to hook up to a computer without a DE-9 serial port.)

Apple changed everything by basically giving no shits about point 1

My point was that that’s what turned touchscreen devices into a mass-market instead of a niche product, while MS (and others like Palm) had been trying to push stylus-operated devices on people for over a decade.

@Maciejasjmj said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Wouldn't basically any conductor work? Surely it couldn't be that expensive to create a somewhat more polished analogue of a pencil wrapped in tinfoil?

Only if — judging by my quick experiment using an iPad and a nail clipper — the contact area of the object is large enough. If electrical conductivity alone was enough, you should be able to use the pencil without any tinfoil, but the chain on the nail clipper or a point on it didn’t register as a tap, while a rivet in it did.

AlexMedia

@Buddy said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

It's easy to point the blame at Microsoft here. I mean, they clearly they fucked up. But even if they had done the needful, in terms of upgrades from 8.1 or the lumia 10 lineup, I'm not convinced appraisin would have ever been able to turn a profit.

I agree with you on that. While reading the article, all I thought was 'Oh, so AppRaisin is a replacement for the 'new and trending' section of the marketplace?'. There isn't much value in such am application.

@Bulb said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

This could have been made up for if Windows Phone's feature set was up to par, but it wasn't.

Also don't forget the lack of features on the development side. Since the thing (WP7) lacked the ability to run anything but .NET code (3rd party), it was not feasible to port any substantial applications with significant amount of code, meaning mainly games, because portable code at the time meant C++ (and mostly still does, though there is Xamarin now).

Yup, true. If I remember correctly WP7 offered a slightly different version of Silverlight (another much-hyped but failed developer product) and if you wanted to do game development you'd have to use XNA, until that got killed off as well.

And the first time when UWP came around (WP 8.1?) it wasn't fully backwards compatible with the Silverlight-based apps either.

masonwheeler

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Silverlight (another much-hyped but failed developer product)

Ohhhh man.

A former employer wanted to build a big online site that would allow our system to interface with others in related industries. Silverlight was new at the time, and Microsoft was hyping it as the Next Big Thing, the person running the project wanted to do it in Silverlight. Nevermind that anyone who took half a look at it could say, as I said at the time, "tries to fill the same niche as Flash, and everyone already has Flash." Nevermind that we were a Delphi shop with no institutional C# experience. The guy running the project wanted to do it in Silverlight, so they did.

They spent years reinventing wheels, building stuff that would have already been available if they'd begun from the existing mature Delphi codebase that the system's whole purpose was to interact with anyway. By the time it launched, Microsoft was already very quietly beginning to de-support Silverlight.

I got another job not too long after that, in a different industry, and it's been a few years, so I have no idea how the project is doing now. But I do remember one of my coworkers asking him why he wanted Silverlight so badly.

"So people can access it over the Web from their Macs."

Analytics showed that not a single person was logging into the system from a non-Windows computer.

AlexMedia

Silverlight suffered from the same problems as Windows Phone 7. The first version came to market years late and lacked many features (v1.0 could only be programmed through external JavaScript!) and while Microsoft added more features in later releases, they never even matched Flash. And by the time they did, browsers were already planning to phase out NPAPI altogether.

The only use Silverlight sees nowadays is as a ransomware delivery mechanism...

e4tmyl33t

@AlexMedia Not true! My company's voiceprint portal (the application we use to pull recorded call logs for our call center) is entirely built in Silverlight!

Of course, this means it runs like complete ass in IE (strangely), doesn't work at all in Chrome (yay no NPAPI) and somehow manages to half-work in Firefox except it doesn't load the playback function, probably because it has to somehow interface with Windows Media Player to do that.

kt_

@accalia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

@Jaloopa said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Kepass

.... that is truly an unfortunate name of an application.

my brain insists on reading it as keep-ass

I think this was the point. ;)

AlexMedia

@e4tmyl33t You have my condolences.

Back in 2009/2010 I was staffed on a project where they had built a prototype for a web application which did not perform at all in IE 8. This was because they used all sorts of JavaScript libraries for controls such as numerical spinners, autocomplete textboxes, et cetera.

As they realised performance really was an issue, I was given some time and budget to look into rewriting everything in Silverlight. While web services + Silverlight vastly outperformed IE8's JavaScript engine, eventually they chose not to change technologies anymore as it would impact the go-to-market date of their product.

blakeyrat

@AlexMedia said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

while Microsoft added more features in later releases, they never even matched Flash.

Part of that is Adobe's ass was scared enough by Silverlight for them to finally release the sane ActionScript 3, which made Flash at least tolerable to develop in.

FrostCat

@Gurth I had a BlackJack II. No touch screen--it had a four-way button.

It actually worked fairly well, except the CPU was underpowered, but a lot of non-smartphones were and still are the same way. And it had a small but fairly thriving collection of apps and games.

FrostCat

@Buddy said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

It's already easy enough to find both of the good apps for Windows 10,

Ouch.

FrostCat

@HardwareGeek said in A developer bets on UWP and loses (article):

Only recently have the screens — actually, the electronics behind them — been good enough to do that.

I had a Pocket PC in 2004 that worked fine with a stylus (or a pen, etc.), but it wasn't cheap--an HP hx4705 iPAQ.