“Windows Phone is the new cool” touts Vision Mobile’s latest Developer Economics report. In it, they point to the fact that 57% of developers plan to adopt Windows Phone very soon. At CodeNgo we’ve had a chance to play with the Lumia 900, and it is not a bad device at all, albeit with quite a few shortcomings in functionality compared to iOS and Android.
Top-8 mobile platforms developers are planning to use, irrespective of their main platform
The release of Windows 8 may of course change that, and with Microsoft’s recent release of the Surface tablet, chances are they may become a serious competitor in the handheld device space. They are even getting rid of old ghosts by dropping the Zune name.
So will buzz equal support? Well according to Vision Mobile it may not necessarily be so. Support will definitely be a function of the tools needed, and Vision Mobile points out the issue of having to have a PC to use the tools. Well, we are not convinced that is the case, as Windows Mobile developers may not necessarily always come from the iOS camp, and there are cross platform tools which negates the need (mostly) for Microsoft’s tools. Perhaps the biggest hindrance is a seemingly tightening of distribution around the Windows Marketplace. Windows apps used to roam free and were distributed by multiple app stores, but are now following the closed Apple model with tougher qualifications for approval and onboarding. This can be a dangerous path to follow and may end up with the same criticism facing iOS, which is lack of distribution opportunities, poor content discovery and too much work going into managing the business side.
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