The Great Windows Phone App Exodus of 2016

Windows phone fans have suffered countless indignities in the year since Microsoft surrendered the smartphone market to Android and iPhone. But none are as hard to bear as the growing exodus of apps from the platform.

It’s been a tough year for Windows phone fans, obviously.

If you’re looking for the exact time of death, you can mark the calendar: On July 8, 2015, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed his employees and told them that he was “fundamentally restructuring” Microsoft’s phone business. The import of this announcement was immediately clear: Microsoft had ceded the smartphone market and would only offer a handful of new phones in the short term—which it later did with the mostly lackluster Lumia 550, 650, 950 and 950 XL models—and then “generate opportunity” for third party hardware makers, like HP with its Elite x3. Part of this strategy is finding niche markets—like the productivity possibilities offered by Continuum—while looking to the future and as-yet-unknown coming mobile markets.

Look, platforms die. But more often they fade into obscurity, or change so dramatically that you almost don’t even recognize them on the other side. Palm’s amazing webOS could have changed the world but didn’t in the wake of the iPhone, but it’s still around as a platform for smart TVs. And today, Blackberry is making a futile last run at the smartphone market with Android-based handsets. But it’s more likely that its QNX platform will continue to see success in automotive/rail, medical, industrial and other vertical markets instead.

As for Windows phone … we’ll see. I noted in Rethinking Windows Phone (also Premium only) that the current rendition of the Windows phone platform, called Windows 10 Mobile, is positioned as a very mobile way to run Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, essentially a more modern take on Windows RT. And while it will never see the retail sales success of Android or iPhone, it could still do pretty well as a locked-down PC-like terminal for businesses.

None of this helps Windows phone fans, whom I hear from every day, literally, via email and Twitter. With a mixture of obstinate independence bordering on the delusional (sorry), many of these people simply refuse to leave the sinking ship. The reasons are many, but often boil down to something that is more emotional than pragmatic: They simply prefer Windows phone, especially its more usable user experience—the Start screen with live tiles, for the most part—which they deem more important to, say, having apps.

To be clear, the Windows phone user experience is superior to that of Android or iOS. But this clearly matters little to the general public, who by choice or ignorance seem to have little issue with the “whack-a-mole” grid of app icons found on the dominant smartphone platforms. What matters to them—pragmatically, not emotionally—is apps. On Android and iPhone, you never need to worry about apps.

But I’ve heard—again and again and again—from Windows phone fans that they have the apps that they need. It’s an argument Mac fans might have made back in the early 2000’s, and it’s an argument Linux guys (if you could find such a person) might even make today as well. Without getting into the psychology of what I think of as settling for less, they’re making a stand. Windows phone is enough.

Until, of course, it isn’t.

Over just the past few months, we’ve seen a steady and growing exodus of apps from the Windows phone platform. These aren’t hugely successful apps—like SnapChat or Pokemon Go—that will never appear on Windows phone. These are apps that Windows phone users have come to rely on that are simply leaving the platform.

Amazon, for example, announced in July that it was “retiring” its Windows phone app, recommending that users simply visit its web site instead. The HERE apps—Drive, Maps, and others—were dropped earlier this year, forcing Microsoft to actually turn its in-house Maps app into something useful. MyFitnessPal just alerted customers that it would “no longer offer an app on the Windows Phone platform” due to “not enough demand.” PayPal said it would “sunset the current version of the app,” forcing users to access the web interface. And even Skype, a Microsoft app, will no longer support Windows Phone 8.x (i.e. the majority of Windows phones out in the world) as of October, with these apps becoming unusable by early 2017.

Yes, there are a few successes. Amazon continues to update Audible on Windows phone for some reason (while it continues to ignore the woefully out-of-date Kindle app), and Spotify said earlier this year that it will continue to support Windows phone. And of course Starbucks recently shipped an app for Windows 10 Mobile. For some reason.

But these are exceptions. Increasingly, Windows phone fans face a world in which there are few major non-Microsoft mobile apps are available for their platform. And a store full of sad third-party apps designed to work, usually poorly, with major services. I’m thinking of things like Phonos, which lets you sort-of access Sonos speakers and services from Windows phone. Better than nothing, yes. But only barely. And the very fact that the Store is full of such apps only serves to highlight the problem: The biggest, newest and best apps and services tend to skip over Windows phone and always will.

Meanwhile, the apps we’ve come to rely on are starting to drift off, never to return. Depending on your needs, any one of these apps could be final straw, so to speak, the moment where you simply can’t take it anymore. And that’s how the platform really dies. Not when Microsoft silently stops making hardware, but when its most loyal users finally realize its over and start looking elsewhere.

And for whatever it’s worth, I’ve been down this road before. When the Amiga platform collapsed along with Commodore in the early 1990’s, I spent a lot of time researching the alternatives available at the time—Windows 3, which was lackluster, OS/2, which was interesting but was clearly never going to succeed, and the Mac, which was far too expensive—and faced the same issues Windows phone fans face today: Nothing came close to the platform I preferred.

That history, of course, is already written: With Windows 95, Microsoft finally created an OS I could actually care about. But I had already settled on Microsoft—with Windows for Workgroups 3.11—before that, in a pragmatic decision based on where the industry was going.

Today is no different. And no less difficult, I know.