Unfortunate news; though most won't miss it, I will. It was the last smartphone option that avoided both the Scylla of Google's data vacuuming and the Charybdis of Apple's pricey walled garden and their "my way or the highway" design philosophy. Plus, the live tiles are actually useful in a smartphone context.<p>Microsoft (and by that I mean both Arbogast and Myerson) was just plain stupid to break app compatibility multiple times between Windows Mobile 6.x and Windows Phone 10. What exactly did they think was going to happen to their app count after pissing off their developer base?
This didn't age well: <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-celebrates-windows-phone-7-with-mock-iphone-funeral/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-celebrates-windows-p...</a>
Curious: Would there be any benefit to open sourcing parts of the OS, at least enough so that it could run on mobile hardware of some kind?<p>I believe HP/Palm open-sourced WebOS after they abandoned the device market, but nobody tried to build a Hackintosh type phone out of it.<p>Back then, that made sense as WebOS suffered from a lack of apps, but in 2019, mobile web apps aren't the afterthought they used to be. I can call an Uber and track the entire journey using their web app manifest ("Add to home screen"). I'm using Uber as an example of a complex app that you wouldn't think would work well as a 'website'.<p>With everything we know about Google's data collection/tracking policies, I'd think there'd be some itnerest in having the option of hardware that ran a non-intrusive mobile OS.