Microsoft has been trying to penetrate the mobile phone platform for quite some time now. Ever since their implementation of the Windows Mobile—a mobile OS based on Windows CE Kernel—in 1996, Microsoft has been trying to establish Windows as a viable mobile operating system. Windows Mobile was even considered the most popular smartphone software in the US in 2007, only to be superseded by competing OS like iOS and Android. Today, iOS and Android have taken up such a large chunk of the smartphone market that Windows Mobile has been pushed into the shadows, just as Microsoft started pushing for development for Windows Phone that would replace Windows Mobile, most probably to offer better hardware compatibility and performance in regards to modern mobile usage. Windows Mobile is no longer supported and the new Windows Phone systems are gracing phones like the Nokia Lumia line that has received considerable praise from users, but unfortunately not to the extent that iOS or Android has. 

Windows Phone started with Windows Phone 7, that confused users into thinking that the mobile OS was a derivative of the popular Windows 7 desktop OS, but unfortunately it had very little to do with its desktop counterpart. Windows Phone 7 was still built on top of the Windows CE Kernel that powered their Windows Mobile line of OS. Although it was safer for Microsoft to adopt the CE Kernel into Windows Phone 7, because it had already been implemented on mobile devices like smartphone and Palm PCs before as it had low hardware requirements. But although the CE Kernel had been easily adapted into mobile devices before, it fell short on a lot of fronts like: support for multicore processors, constrained application sizes, poor security, and offered only partial compatibility to Windows APIs like Win32 applications and DirectX support. To put it bluntly, the CE Kernel was an old relic and Microsoft needed a kernel powerful enough to accommodate the needs of the modern smartphone user and the CE Kernel was not up to par. Microsoft really needed to step up their game to actually penetrate the mobile market dominated by iPhones and a plethora of Android phones. 

Thus came Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 8 ditched the old Windows CE Kernel for the Windows NT Kernel, used in desktop grade OSes from Microsoft. Since the NT Kernel had never been used on a mobile platform before, Microsoft needed time to actually optimise it for mobile processors that were based on the ARM architecture. This could explain the use of the CE Kernel in Windows Phone 7. Microsoft needed time to get the NT Kernel ready for mobile platforms but also needed to challenge rival OSes. This meant that Windows Phone 7 was just a front for Microsoft as they worked on optimising the NT Kernel for phones, which came two years later backing the Windows Phone 8. Although it was a welcome, and necessary, change on the backend of Windows Phones, Windows Phone 8 brought very little to the table in terms of customer features. It seemed as if all effort had been channeled into bringing the NT Kernel to mobile platforms that almost no change was made on the user-side of the OS. Thus, Windows 8 felt like the same old Windows Phone 7. But the successful implementation of the NT Kernel onto the phone meant that Microsoft could easily run desktop applications on mobile platforms since they shared the same kernel. With this came Microsoft’s idea of a Universal Windows Platform (UWP), an idea that started with Windows 8, slightly bettered in Windows 8.1 and almost perfected in Windows 10. UWP is an idea that revolves around the fact that apps written for one platform could be scaled on all platforms with minor or no change to the core code at all. This meant that developers could develop one platform and have their apps run simultaneously on desktops, phones, tablets and even on television screens. 

A bold idea that we had been introduced to in Windows 8 was the Metro apps; but because of Microsoft’s poor implementation of the Metro apps in desktop Windows the full-screen clunky touch-screen friendly apps felt out of place within Windows; this led to a lot of backlash on Windows 8. Furthermore, to push their idea of UWP, Microsoft released the updated Windows 8.1 that tried to solved much of the problems with Metro Apps and native x86 and x64 desktop apps but that too felt forced and half-baked. 

With Windows 10, the bridge between touch-friendly Metro apps and native apps seems to have been well-constructed and Microsoft seems to be on the right track this time around, while implementing their bold idea of a Universal Windows Platform. Unlike Windows 8 or 8.1, Windows 10 has developed their Store apps pretty well. Now, they are resizable, appear on the taskbar, and are not forced to run in full-screen mode all the time. This makes using Microsoft’s applications developed on their new design language a pleasure to use since they don’t act any differently to how native and traditional apps on Windows behave. This, in turn, has led to the development of Windows Phone 10, that has improved functionality in many different fronts, from backend kernel development to front-end user-based improvements that should give Windows Phone OSes a fighting chance against competitors like iOS and Android. 

The only problem holding Windows Phone’s growth now is the massive app gap that exists between Windows Store, Apple’s App Store and Play Store. Apple and Google already have a massive database of mobile apps that complement their operating systems, but Microsoft still seems to be lagging behind on this front, as many apps that are imperative on other platforms appear to be missing on the Windows Store. This could well be because of the low adoption rate for Windows Phones and even with Windows 10’s seamless integration of Store apps. Developers would be reluctant to develop apps for desktop as they have fully-functional web-based applications that work equally well from a desktop grade browser and because the Windows Phone market still seems to be lagging behind. But all in all, the Windows Phone platform seems to be growing and Microsoft also seems to be spearheading the mobile market into a different direction altogether. How well the UWP idea will work and how fast the Windows Store ecosystem will grow is something that’s still left to be seen. But if all works out well for Microsoft, we might see a new contender enter the mobile OS market. 

Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes in the past, both regarding their Windows product line as well as their Windows Phone product line, but with their release of Windows 10, maybe the tides will turn in favour of Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform idea. And if it does, it bodes well for all Windows and Windows Phone users. 

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