"...none can be spared to ensure there's any quality to the end-of-life care for the doomed platform."
And the situation is even more bleak for the mobile version.
Although Microsoft officially supports Windows 10 Mobile, each update breaks new things – and it has reached comical proportions. Or tragic, if you're still using it. Man shooting himself in the foot overlaid with Windows Phone image That amazing Microsoft software quality, part 97: Windows Phone update kills Outlook, …
Seriously, Microsoft ... your "touch first" experiment has failed. Everyone knows it. Now can we PLEASE get Windows back to the point where it is optimized for computers with upright screens, keyboards and mice ... you know, the machines where 99.999% of Windows installations are?
If you can program, if you can speak a foreign language, if you have a natural ability to find those bugs that everyone else seems to have missed... why not help UBPorts on the UTouch project, or help the Halium project to make all these different undocumented bits of hardware work in the same way. Even a small donation to either project would help them produce a viable alternative phone.
Because they are building a FOSS phone, you can be sure it won't be sending all your personal to Google/Apple/your chosen carrier. If you don't like the apps they provide, build your own.
If you want to get involved, it is best if you have an old Nexus4, 5 or 5X but they also need intrepid people with other hardware to report back on how far you get making it run.
The ever so sad thing here is, despite being released by the same behemoth that overloads their desktop OS with a shedload of unwanted App Crap (tm), the MSWin phone still seemed less locked-down than Apple's fortified fortress garden, and Google's attempts to build an equally armored fortress on the opposing hill.
Maybe we should start porting ReactOS to abandoned WinPhones...
>You'd have thought that with a near-trillion dollar market cap and 131,000 employees across the world, that one person, even an intern or trainee, could have been tasked with trying out new Store client updates on an actual Windows phone? Just one?"
Um, I hate to break it to you but the update was coded by that one intern....
Running a Lumia 950 here (in Oz). No issues at all*. I still know of a few other hold-outs (950, 950, 950 XL, 930), and no issues with any of those either.
Yes, we're still getting updates, but none of us are in the "insider" scheme.
*OK, there is one major issue. The battery is gradually dying, and that's a terminal problem.
I'm going to have to choose soon: Apple or Android. I don't want either, but the Andromeda unicorn hasn't shown up, so I'll have to toss a coin eventually.
....while SatNav is making the shareholders money. That is the problem. He's ruining MS's reputation with the QA by firing loads of people when he started. And he's so hell bent on moving everything to the cloud and eventually, sadly, trying to make Windows 10 a streaming OS (which will end up forcing lots of people to Linux I suspect) he's killing quality. But while he still makes the big shareholders money, they don't care.
Once upon a time, in a corner of China, there was a mythical group of phone testers called KONG MING.
Software teams would send their software to Kong Ming and Kong Ming would find timing errors and functional errors and feature errors and stability errors and generally test the sh*t out of your mobile phone software. You could even send them software and ask them to reproduce issues. By return you'd get a comprehensive bug report and the choice of improving your product quality.
(Not all teams improved their software..)
Then Nokia sold the whole lot to Microsoft, who fired them. The End.
windows mobile was the most basic of all the mobile user interfaces. any simpler - ui wise - and u're in coloured blocks and abacus territory.
that they could fuck that up is truly remarkable. really, how do you fuckup basic ui elements like text boxes and radio buttons? they come in any standard html toolkit ffs.
Microsoft could have taken the high road and not treated customer data as "the product" like Facebook and Google. The Nokia Camera could have ruled the roost. "seamless" integration from desktop to laptop to tablet to phone...
Instead, more distrust for ANY Microsoft hardware product. More "hate" for Microsoft updates (should be called designed breakages). I don't want to learn another API or yet another UI. Maybe when my unsupported Lumia 950XL becomes unusable there will be viable ( as in business usable), Linux based or other open source offerings. I'm only slightly more happy with Apple than I am with Andriod.