Another sad day to cry about what we lost…

Over the past two weeks two very different updates have happened to two key Windows Phone apps for me. The first one is a WhatsApp update that has started to show WhatsApp’s end of support message, telling users that the app will only work on their device up until December 31^st of this year. It’s a sad development that we’ve talked about before and a reminder as to why you should all probably ditch your Windows Phones now and not buy any new ones either. The other update however , went to probably my favorite app not just on my Lumia 540 but in Microsoft’s whole ecosystem; OneNote.

By mid-June it became quite public that the OneNote app for windows 10 on PCs was getting an update that allowed it to support everyone’s new favorite power (and eye) saving feature, Dark Mode and there was enough fanfare from OneNote die-hards about it. However, despite OneNote’s loving the update on my PC as well, I felt a tinge of sadness as I thought my phone likely wouldn’t get it as well(despite actually still getting regular updates for all it’s Office apps including the new Microsoft Office icon pack as well). Thankfully, whoever is still working on OneNote at Microsoft is just as passionate about Windows phone as I am, and threw the Windows 10 Mobile version a bone due to it being a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app and being basically the same app at a technical level as the PC one. This new update not only revitalized my love for OneNote (which I use on the go a lot much more on my phone than my laptop) but also reminded me of what Windows Phone (especially Windows 10 Mobile) was meant to be, and how that dream is unfortunately dead now.

Now to be straight, this isn’t another “why Windows Phone was great” article. You’ll tons of those on the web already. This is more of a look at what the smartphone OS was meant to be especially in the form of Windows 10 Mobile, how some of those aspects where brought to life, and the unfortunate shame that that vision was never completed and the OS came crumbling down. You see half the reason I love OneNote so much is it’s online and offline integration with both Windows 10 on the PC and the phone. I could easily type out a note on the PC , leave it half done and see the same note highlighted on my phone’s start menu as soon as I open the OneNote app on my phone as long as both are connected to the web. Now anyone can say this makes sense since OneNote is a Microsoft app and Microsoft is renowned for great cloud services, but the goal was to make basically every Windows 10 app work like this. Through UWP apps, Microsoft aimed to have copies on an app both on your Windows Phone and PC, and that allowed continued experiences before both apps that shared data and allowed you to carry your data wherever you are and work on it if need be. It made a Windows 10 mobile device an extension of your PC, one you could interact with more often and stay away from the bigger heavier machine unless you completely needed it. And yes, in a world where everything can be stored in the cloud this is possible on iOS and Android devices too, in fact Microsoft itself has made steps for that to be possible. But it’s not as seamless and effortless as it was designed to be if you had a Windows device. You can’t automatically get all your PC’s Wifi passwords on your Android device like you can on your Windows Phone, you can’t natively copy custom VPN settings either, You don’t get shared notifications on both devices that you can manage from either one without using a separate app like Your Phone in the case of managing texts on iOS or Android, can’t get the few useful Cortana tasks that work offline and you most obviously don’t get that shared app experience that I personally use for key apps like Poki for Pocket and even an old GameBoy emulator that saves my games across my devices on OneDrive. Apple die-hards will rush to point out that their ecosystem between iOS and MacOS has the same features, and honestly they’re right. But what’s amusing is that Apple itself started to copy some of these features after seeing how they worked on Windows Devices (even the new project sidecar is the type of remote desktop screen projection Windows has boasted for almost a decade now) and unlike in apple’s world you didn’t have to cough up more than a thousand dollars to get both a Windows Phone and PC. In fact, these features still work even on your less then 200-dollar Lenovo or HP machine and less than 50 dollar Windows 10 Mobile device. Microsoft had democratized the fluidity people could only previously found on iOS and had even made things easier for Windows developers through the Universal Windows Platform as they had to build only one app that worked across a wide range of Windows devices. And if you think that was a dumb idea, you may find it funny that both Apple and Google have started copying this model with MacOS running iOS apps and Chrome OS running Android Apps respectively.

In the end, every time I turn on Dark Mode on my Lumia (while I await the new Android phone I ordered) I remember something I have heard too often in the tech community; Microsoft was on to something with Windows Phone. But it seems even they weren’t sure exactly what that was and failed to bring it to life effectively enough for customers to totally get behind them. And as I write the Windows Phone eulogy for December on my Lumia (no jokes, personal challenge) I’ll at the very least remember these bright spots in Windows 10 Mobile, and wait to see how many of them have been effectively moved to Android.

Tell us your thoughts on Windows Phone and what phone you may get now that it’s support is ending. I ‘ll also be taking guesses for the phone you guys think I bought.

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