Windows 10 is giving Microsoft another shot at mobile market, but where does that leave its current (Windows Phone) developers? Microsoft has a strong development community and they counted on that when launching Windows Phone, but have they lost its credit?

I’m running a digital agency Axilis that made a bet on Windows Phone platform some four years ago. Most of us in the team were developers experienced in Microsoft stack and although Microsoft came a bit late in the game, we believed that there is a room for a third platform in the mobile market and due to our experience with Microsoft, it was worth the bet. Windows Phone launch was a pretty humble in terms of users, so we started building our own apps, mostly to learn the platform and get some references.

Although the start was slow, eventually our bet started to pay off. Windows Phone started getting traction on some non-US markets and that forced some businesses to take Windows Phone into account. Somewhere around late 2013, we started getting a decent number of Windows Phone gigs and that continued throughout the whole 2014.

Our experiences? Clients that wanted Windows Phone apps where mainly big companies, like banks, that are expected to have their mobile apps running on almost all platforms (like they still support J2ME apps☺). But, most of that apps got stuck in version 1.0, or got just some minor update with bugfixes. As far as I see, that’s a common scenario with Windows Phone apps. Even Facebook does not update it’s app regularly. Why? I guess because that spike in growth didn’t last long.

April 2015, Microsoft announces easy migration of iOS and Android apps to the upcoming Windows 10 OS. It’s a good move for Microsoft, but I’m sure that there were many developers that had a bitter taste in their mouth after that. Microsoft failed with Windows Phone, and even if Windows 10 succeeds — would you go and develop your Windows 10 app from scratch or just convert it from an existing iOS app? I believe that the answer here is simple. At least until Windows 10 shows some market results.

Just like Microsoft is waiting for a release of Windows 10 with its flagship phones, potential Windows Phone/10 app customers are waiting for Windows 10 market results to decide whether it makes sense to build an app. From our perspective, demand for Windows Phone apps fell significantly recently. I guess it’s due to reasons above.

I personally believe that Windows 10 might be a success, but the truth is that no one can guarantee that. Considering the fact that a real launch of Windows 10 will probably be in the fall and some significant market results won’t be visible in a next couple of months, there will definitely be a pretty long period where most of the apps will just be converted instead of developed for Windows 10. Universal apps and their ability to run on various Windows 10 devices, from phones to desktops, are for sure a cute thing, but I don’t see that market will hop on that before Windows 10 shows some traction.

It may come as a big disappointment for some developers, but I hope that most of them at have least paid off their investments in the platform during it’s peak as we did. Stall period is definitely ahead and Windows Phone development didn’t turn out to be long-term business for vast majority of developers.

Our plans? Xamarin helped us to easily refocus on iOS and Android apps without a significant investment in education and we plan to stay on that course for now. We believe in Windows 10 and would be happy to develop apps for it, but Microsoft —this time show us some numbers first, we won’t hop on the train before that.