14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s latest financial results revealed a drop of no less than 49 percent in Windows Phone’s revenues, so it’s very clear that interest in the platform is not as high as the company hoped it to be.
But with figures continuously going down and never recovering, some software developers see no reason to invest in Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile apps and decide to halt such projects.
Chinese company Tencent, who is the owner of super popular messaging app QQ, has announced that development of its Windows 10 Mobile client has been halted because too many users are leaving the platform and “we didn’t notice that Microsoft is showing any effort to retain them.”
It’s the cruel reality
In a statement posted on its website and translated by ZDNet, Tencent explains that it’s all because “reality is cruel” and Windows Phone does nothing more than collapse.
“Despite that the era of Windows 10 Mobile is coming, we may not follow closely this time. It is not because we are changing, but the reality is cruel, which drives us to change and adapt to the time,” Tencent explains in the announcement.
“Users on the Windows Phone platform keeps declining and have moved to other platforms, but [we] didn't notice that Microsoft is showing any effort to retain them. But we believe that Windows 10 Mobile is a good platform which is yet a hit to the market.”
Tencent’s decision is living proof that market share does play a decisive role for developers who are planning to code for mobile platforms and shows why Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile are suffering from the lack of apps.
In case you’re wondering, Tencent’s existing QQ Windows Phone client received the last update on June 12, 2015, while its iOS and Android clients got their most recent update this month. The same for other very popular apps, including Waze and Instagram, with iOS and Android apps being updated frequently while Windows Phone versions seem to be left behind.