Why I’ll never use Windows Phone again

It's been a while since I posted a good rant. Here's one that's been brewing for some time. I refuse to belive that ANY Microsoft employes that ever had an iPhone or Android, actually tried to use Windows Phone for a full year. I have and I can tell you - it's utter bullshit. I don't doubt that a lot of talented people have worked hard to make it happen, but without someone capable of telling what is good and bad, you cannot succeed. The whole OS reeks of a lack of interest and use.

I gave it a full year as I figured they'd get som time to fix the major bugs. Despite three fixes delivered over the air, they have not solved anything that could help me like the platform. They have however added a menu with "Extra settings" that I'll never use.

Here's my 6 biggest annoyances:

The Search Button

This is my single biggest gripe with Windows Phone and the person that made this choice should be fired immediately. He/she has done irreversible damage to the company in insisting on this bug/feature. When I'm pressing the search button - it is ALWAYS in a context! I have ZERO interest in opening Bing (see below) when I'm clicking the search button - EVER! If I'm in Spotify - I want to search Spotify for a song. If I'm in my contacts list - I want to search for my contacts. If I'm in a browser, I want my PREFERRED search engine. This would be so easy to understand if you ever used this phone.

When more than 50% of all apps (including Microsoft's own) needs to implement it's own search button in software AND you have a physical one that does not do anything sensible - it would be obvious to most developers to combine these. In many apps there's actually a menu bar at the bottom of the screen just to show a search button. It must be some incredibly stubborn person inside the company that insists on this. That person cannot be using Windows Phone at all. After using it for a year, I now have a long list of (mostly shitty) applications. To change a setting I have to scroll quite far. Imagine how neat it would have been to search this list of apps instead of going to Bing.

Menus

Settings menu is presented as text, but non alphabetical. Why on earth is Flight Mode and (screen) Brightness not on first page, when Theme & Internet Sharing is at the top? How often will anyone Microsoft developers actually change their theme? And how many "average" users will ever use the internet sharing? And why use text rather than icons for a non-alphabetical list? I refuse to believe that a single hour of user testing went into this.

Internet sharing

This feature turns off at it's own will. If I turn it on - I really want it to be on ALL the time UNTIL I turn it off myself. I have no interest in power saving for this feature. I just want it to work an not turn off every time I take a minute to answer an email. It does not work the way it's implemented now. It's simply too annoying to use.

Common volume

There is one common volume setting on the whole phone. This controls both media playback, ringtones, speaker volume and haptic feedback. Turn it off and you'll walk for half a day enjoying silence. Then you'll panic and realize you've lost tons of phone calls, Skype calls, messages and other notifications. Smart smartphones knows that AT LEAST the ringtone must be a separate volume or people will screw up and if this is due to the smart-phone not being smart enough, they'll get a better phone.

Lack of apps

It's ok not to have thousands of apps just when you're launching something. It's ok that not all the major app vendors support you right away. You MUST however do some filtering and make some CORE apps. Not having a youtube app is unforgivable. I know Youtube is a Google property, but that's irrelevant. Without a proper Youtube-app, you only got half a smartphone. It's that important. Allowing more than 30 wrappers around the web version of youtube is not adding value. It is destroying value. If I have to download 10 bad apps just to get one that is good, I'll stop downloading apps. It's that simple. Throw out the shit, retain and promote quality.

It's ok to not make just as good apps as Google, but you need to have the basics working. The Maps-application that come with Windows Phone, fails to locate pretty much anything other than cities. If that's a feature, you should probably name it "City-search", but you should not call it "maps" if it cannot find features on a map. I've viewed maps in the app and stared on the name (written on the map) and despite this, the search feature is unable to find that very location. I dunno why, but there apparently no relation between the map and the search. This makes the app somewhat useless.

If you want to get thousands of QUALITY apps in your store, you need to make sure that the vendors of cross platform authoring systems add your export. Adding Windows Phone export in Adobe AIR could give you millions of new installs. All they'd need to do is to recompile and export. Unity already exports to Windows Phone and I'm sure quite a bit of the current apps come from that. Nobody will learn a new platform/OS unless it's from Apple/Google and you know you have a huge market waiting. If you're entering this market to compete with them, you'll need to make it super-easy to make apps. You cannot force everyone to get a PC and learn Visual Studio.

Slowness

My WinPhone is a Samsung Ativ S. The specs are pretty neat. It should be lightning fast. When I type a URL in the browser, suggestions will pop up as I type. This is nice, but not when the first suggestion pops up 3 whole seconds after I started typing. As I try to tap any of these suggestions, the list will re-order, so and I'll open some random URL. Come on. This is just looking up and displaying a list. It's a very basic programming task. How can this possibly take three seconds on this hardware and why on earth didn't anybody notice this and fix it after a whole year?

Bonus grudge: Bing as a search engine

I refuse to believe that it isn't possible to make something better than Bing. If I'm at a silent party I will sometimes pull up my phone and have people suggest random things that we should search for using Bing. We'll then laugh together at the results. Yeah - the results are so bad that it's fun. They are for some reason much worse if searching from a phone than from the desktop. If I worked at Microsoft search department I'd be crying.

One example: at Bitraf I hosted a workshop about "Myke kretser" (Soft Circuits written in Norwegian). Just before the event I used Bing to see if they had indexed the page. This was a month after I put it up on Meetup.com. The search for "Myke Kretser" returned 1970's NBA player "Mike Kretzer" first and then even more irrelevant results. Come on. Not even one of the two words are alike or has even remotely the same meaning? Google had it right two days after I posted the event on Meetup. Bing now returns the correct phrase, but links to my slides from the workshop (derivate) rather then the Meetup page (source).

Bye, bye

If I spent more time, I could probably come up with more than 30 solid software and usability bugs in Windows Phone. The whole OS is incredibly unpolished. In addition, my Samsung Ativ S phone has been randomly rebooting at least once a day. I originally attributed this to a software bug, but none of the updates from Microsoft/Samsung ever solved it. To be honest, I now doubt it's a hardware bug. Good riddance Windows Phone. It's been an annoying year with you. I won't go back…