The firm tight-lipped on what’s going to happen after RS3

Feb 16, 2017 09:25 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft will release Windows 10 Mobile Creators Update together with its PC sibling this spring, most likely in April, and the company said in a statement that updates would ship to smartphones even after that, thus trying to clarify rumors that it could give up on the platform.

A recent report speculated that Microsoft could abandon Windows 10 Mobile after Redstone 3, which is due in the fall, for a different mobile strategy that would have the company invest in a different project for smartphones, such as Windows 10 on ARM.

While this is still in the speculation stage right now, Microsoft’s statements do not clarify what happens after Redstone 3, the OS update that is rumored to be the last major release for Windows 10 Mobile.

For the moment, however, Microsoft says it’s all in on Windows 10 Mobile and it has no plans to change that in the near feature.

“We've been flighting Mobile builds now for-- actually, since the November Update in 2015. We do not plan to change that, or to stop that. And you'll see - today, we are still flighting Mobile builds, subject to quality, subject to those release promotion criteria, and we fully expect to keep doing that beyond the release of the Creators Update,” Microsoft's Bill Karagounis was quoted as saying recently.

Windows 10 Mobile focusing on productivity

Dona Sarkar, the head of the Windows Insider program, has explained recently that Microsoft is keen on investing in Windows 10 Mobile, but once again, there were no specifics on how the company wants to improve the platform in the long term, other than the same productivity target that Microsoft is trying to bring on all its devices.

“The future of Windows 10 Mobile is that we're continuing to invest in Mobile. We're definitely going towards more ‘let's help you be as productive as possible with this device in your pocket that you have all the time on you’. We roll builds every week [to internal or external rings], we push features, we do the thing; it's a thing that we continue to invest in, just like all device families,” she said.

So there you go, Windows 10 Mobile will live on, at least in the short term, although the bigger problem right now seems to be the lack of devices. Nobody at Microsoft comments on the possibility of launching new smartphones, and the Surface Phone continues to be a project that all of us are still dreaming about.