Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be something that they just can't get right about mobile OS (or probably its simply the fact that the market doesn't have space enough for yet another proprietary OS).
MS will do a lot better if it focuses on making android betters, supporting .NET apps in android (yay Mono!). Maybe in the future they could revisit the mobile OS thing and have better luck then but for the near future it looks very unlikely.
The mark of a good company is adaptability. Intel went from RAM chip maker to creating microprocessors, MS itself went from creating BASIC compilers to making OS's. With Azure, .NET, Office, Windows etc. I think they have enough areas to make money off. Its just their strategy of adapting windows to mobile devices didn't work.
I only see a value on .NET apps on Android for those companies planning to do both iOS and Android, or re-using existing .NET code.
For those just targeting Android, specially given the global market share, they are better off with plain Java/Kotlin + NDK, than adding yet another layer to debug and extra APK size.
As I said, in the context of targeting both iOS and Android it makes sense, but OP meant targeting only Android.
And despite my advocacy, when targeting both mobile OSes, customers at enterprise level tend to pick Ionic or pure Web approaches, despite the lower UX.
Wow, I didn't even know Intel was a RAM chip maker before doing microprocessors... or that Microsoft started with BASIC. Thanks for the historical notes!
Haha, sorry about that! Didn't know HP started with calculators either! (I know they've all had these products, but I had no idea these are how they started.)
> Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Information changes but a UI should be static, a UI that changes based on what is available is a recipe for a poor user experience. I have a hard enough time navigating rows of icons (as opposed to a list of app names), I don't need the icons changing randomly.
Aside from that, one of the missing features of tiles was interactivity, on android I've had an MP3 player widget on my home screen since I first got an HTC hero and playing music is a core feature for my phone. As flashy as tiles were they didn't have that level of functionality.
I don't love the design, but I like it.
Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Yes, there are some bad designs in the Windows 10 Mobile, but all of them are fixable. And once those problems get fixed, it will be gorgeous.
I feel very sad about their current failure, and I don't think simply give up is a good choose.