I still love my Windows Phone but I'm starting to get frustrated at the pace of things.
It's almost mind-boggling how little has been released between the WP8 launch and now. From a hardware perspective, as awesome as the Lumia 920 and HTC 8x were, there really hasn't been much since then. HTC hasn't released anything - they were rumored to be launching a version of the One running Windows Phone but that never happened. Samsung hasn't released anything substantial. Even Nokia is dragging its feet. 2013 saw the 925 and 1020, which were basically just rehashes of the 920. So far in 2014, we've had the Icon, which is a nice step, but it's only on Verizon and not that awe-inspiring...and too bad the 930 isn't available on any other carriers in the US. So if you're an AT&T or T-Mobile user, your best option is still essentially a two year old phone. Sad. Supposedly there will be some new stuff this fall, but we'll see.
Then, from the software front, things aren't much better. Since then, we've had a few maintenance releases not worth talking about. I've been running the WP 8.1 dev preview since it came available, and it's one of those cases of two steps forward, two steps back. On one hand, some of the additions are invaluable - the notification center improves the experience drastically, Cortana is useful (for Google-Now style notifications mostly, but I'll take it), the new keyboard is nice....but then, in some areas, they've crippled the experience.
With WP7, most things built into the operating system were very tightly coupled and integrated. This led to a fast, smooth, consistent experience - but that also makes it hard for Microsoft to update. So they've been slowly breaking pieces off - and the results aren't always positive.
Let's start with music. Last year, they broke a lot of things when they transitioned from Zune to Xbox Music in WP8. I wrote about it
here. With WP 8.1, it's gotten worse...much worse. They've completely rewritten the Music app from the ground up. Hey - I get it! The old music app was likely written in native C code for the Zune HD, and messily ported into Windows Phone. Sometimes you have to make a clean break. I'm a software engineer, I know how that goes. The problem is, this clean break sucks. Real bad. The app is incredibly slow, it's incredibly buggy, sometimes it doesn't play songs, it lacks basic features of the old app (recent/new music, for example), and the new Radio feature is a pathetic imitation of the old SmartDJ. I've had a Zune Pass since 2008 and I'm strongly considering cancelling it, because I can barely use that app.
They've also broken one of the more unique / useful features of Windows Phone - the People Hub. This, again, I understand. The old People Hub was tightly coupled to the OS, so if Facebook or Twitter made a breaking API change, Microsoft had to release an OS upgrade to fix it. No one wants that. However, rather than just separating that module out, they turned the whole system into a "plugin" architecture - in theory, this is great. Now anyone can integrate to the People hub, and the onus is on them to fix it. In practice, it's so much slower. Nowhere near as clean of an experience. No more cross-posting between Twitter and Facebook. Just not as good.
Also, they've removed Facebook chat from Messaging. THIS is what they should have made plug-and-play! I love the idea of combined messaging - this is something Palm got right back in what, 2008, when the Pre came out? They should have opened up the API for the messaging hub so people could write, say, Google Chat or Skype plugins. Instead they've gone the other way, and it's annoying.
Anyway....now that the ranting is done, it's still my favorite platform. Not enough has changed in Android or iOS to sway me that way. It's just frustrating to see the platform going...well, sideways, rather than forward. Every time we see one of these side steps we're told "don't worry, it's good for the future, it sets this up to be better down the road"....how many times can that be the case? When IS that future?