It's that chicken-and-egg problem where people don't want to use it because it doesn't have the apps they need, and developers don't want to make apps for it because it doesn't have enough users. Microsoft tried to throw money at the problem to middling success. But I think it was too little too late.
I'm not sure why paying developers is a problem to bootstrap the ecosystem. Although, if they were paying for temple run (as the image might suggest) that seems odd. Mostly because presumably they should be targeting the apps everyone uses that don't have good replacements (aka netflix/prime streaming/etc).
I would guess that they aren't the only ones. Do you think LG/Sony/Samsung/roku/apple tv/firestic/etc all got the netflix app ported for free? Maybe. Plex probably isn't getting paid, and they do it too..
But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.
> But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.
Their (forward) app compatibility was actually very good. I wrote a WP7 Silverlight app in 2011 that still works on the last release of Windows Mobile 10.
But that was basically quite late in the game, microsoft had been making a phone OS's for ~ a decade at that point. In 2011 it seemed like MS was already putting it on life support.
It was not just any anonymous developers, it was Google specifically making Gmail and Youtube not working on the Windows Phone. They refused to port their apps, and when Microsoft created clones (i.e. Microsoft built Youtube apps) Google made them not work on the back-end and threatened to sue MS.
It was just monopoly abusing its walled garden and being anticompetitive, nothing else. Not that Microsoft would behave any differently, if the positions were switched.
It's that chicken-and-egg problem where people don't want to use it because it doesn't have the apps they need, and developers don't want to make apps for it because it doesn't have enough users. Microsoft tried to throw money at the problem to middling success. But I think it was too little too late.