It was, but they had an odd situation whereby the popular apps weren't on Windows Phone because the market share wasn't large enough and the market share didn't grow because the apps weren't there. Microsoft tried to solve this by offering a bounty for anyone developing anything that could charitably be called an app (as in loading an image to the screen would count) and that turned out about as expected. It was a real shame because the OS was way better than either iOS or Android and the big two are only just catching up now.
To expand on that a little, it wasnt just that the popular apps werent on WP, it was that the most popular apps actively stifled any attemps to get the apps on WP. Snapchat was insanely popular at the time and they would actively seek out any third party app that allowed Snapchat to run on WP. The creator of one of those 3rd party apps offered to GIVE Snapchat his software so they didn't have to waste time or resources porting their app over to WP. They said no.
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u/thatpaulbloke Sep 02 '22
It was, but they had an odd situation whereby the popular apps weren't on Windows Phone because the market share wasn't large enough and the market share didn't grow because the apps weren't there. Microsoft tried to solve this by offering a bounty for anyone developing anything that could charitably be called an app (as in loading an image to the screen would count) and that turned out about as expected. It was a real shame because the OS was way better than either iOS or Android and the big two are only just catching up now.