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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
178 points (95.9% liked)
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It's a good thing they stopped.
Right now any phone's UI is about 10 times faster than windows 11 is on a modern computer. Just imagine a phone that's this slow.
That is a bad take, IMO. More competition in the phone OS market is better than the virtually 2 that we have now (yes, I know there are alternatives, but android and ios collectively make up over 98% of the OS market). They're all offered by terrible companies, yes, but letting Google and Apple completely dominate the market unchecked hasn't exactly resulted in a healthy situation, either.
Source for mobile OS percentage: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-share/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-135251641.html
I agree competition is generally a good thing, but microsoft has demonstrated that they can't do it.
Android is open source at least, so the people who give a shit can run a custom ROM that works without google stuff or at least sandboxes it so it can't do anything the user doesn't want it to.
A proper solution would be to mandate that manufacturers ship their phones without proprietary software so that users have to actively make the decision between installing google/apple/manufacturer services and alternatives.
Custom ROMs work that way already, you flash them and then you flash google apps or microG. You could also flash neither of those if you wanted to.
Flashing from recovery has already gotten easy with TWRP, so manufacturers could streamline that to make it foolproof for the initial setup process.
(commenting from another instance since feddit.de is having issues right now, please @ the other account as well if you reply)
I think more competition is good, but it's highly unlikely that the behemoth Microsoft would provide the type of competition that would really benefit the consumer. More likely they'd be competing against Apple and Google to see who could extract the most money and data out of their users.
An Ubuntu like alternative exists and has existed for over a decade. Canonical abandoned it a few years back and someone else is trying to develop it but there's basically zero interest or traction.
Mozilla also tried it with Firefox OS.
Windows may indeed perform like shit, but Windows phone didn't. It rang rings around android big time in terms of performance.
Windows phone was heavily stripped down.