What do you think took windows out of the mobile phone race leaving just iOS and Android when they have some of the best development tools?

For me their community wasn't vibrant enough, maybe it's because they didn't pay much attention to mobile app development.

It was essentially windows8.1 on a mobile phone.

No one.... and I mean no one, liked windows 8 🔥

If you fail at obtaining market share of maintaining it (think blackberry) then you end up out of the game.

Sadly there's no competition anymore outside of Android / iOS.
And no custom roms don't count.

Good ideas, but only a couple phones and bad press about their OS upgrades and just no APPS.

Well, the fact that windows phones needed 3x more hardware requirements can explain it too...
I almost bought one, but couldn't install android on it so fk it...

I think to launch a competitive phone OS you’d have to have light containers to run android apps so your App Store wasn’t dry for so long. Idk if that’s even legal. Maybe you could make a Java package that fixed the android code to run on the new OS? Hard to dodge it getting bulky fast.

I didn't like the UI, but I liked some of their ideas, especially that MS really tried to make 1 platform across devices. Also, it was a nice gimmick to change the theme's accent color by detecting the hardware skin, but apart from that, Android already had a huge user base and loads of apps which is hard to beat.

Microsoft was not the only one to stay behind Android and iOS, some goes for Firefox / Ubuntu phones and probably Sailfish or what was it called ...

@GyroGearloose as far as I know, Windows Phones ran on lesser RAM and less powerful CPUs

So, if you are not able to install Android, that's because Android has higher requirements than Windows