Probably cheaper...
It'll probably be cheaper to just send a budget Android phone to all those that signed the petition than employ the development staff, and support the windows version.
Frustrated Windows fans are lobbying the creators of Pokémon Go to bring the augmented reality game to their smartphones and devices. Forty thousand individuals so far have signed a petition at Change.org for Pokémon Go to be ported to Windows 10 and Windows mobile. According to the petition on Change.org: With the above …
The hard reality is that it costs money to develop an support applications on a target platform . Finance people will have done the calculation against the potential target audiences and decided its not worth it.
Who can blame them given that the use of Windows generally is dwindling.
This. I wondered about making apps as a hobby (you know, like all those other hobbies we have :P ).
It's easier and cheaper for me to buy and Arduino and program it, than try to navigate the hurdles and costs of uploading for Android or iOS (yes I know there are free options for testing/home development).
Have things changed?
Developing and even globally releasing for Android is essentially free. It is/was a one off $5 charge. All of the software is free and you can by multiple test devices for peanuts. It's also a p.o.p to develop for.
What possible costs and hurdles are there?
Not sure what you are trying to say here. I have apps in both iOS and Android stores. Uploading is definitely not hard for either - I doubt you'd manage to write the app in the first place if you couldn't figure that out bit out. Android is basically free, and even with iOS you can get second hand kit very cheaply or just borrow someone's Macbook for the day...
It may be true that it isn't worth it at the moment, but it depends on what trends are likely in the future. Pokemon has a good history but there are other apps and games out there that would be a big risk to support and no doubt the competition have already produced something that people may not switch from. A little like windows mobile and ios or android. As we have seen from android, produce a decent OS and Store then various large and small manufacturers will buy in. After being slow on the uptake this is what Microsoft are trying to do. Only time will tell if windows mobile is great enough for people to switch from incompatible systems and if some app developers have seen the trend early enough for it still to be worth it.
It sucks to be on the platform with the smallest market share. I have a windows phone because they are cheap, reliable and work well with PCs. I honestly don't expect any apps to appear beyond the standard social media ones. If I wanted that I would have stayed with Android but I found I simply didn't use any.
Well... Seriously: for me it's an advert to continue to buy into this phone. I like it that the platform doesn't follow all the hypes and just boringly does what it has always done. Of course it also helps that I mostly use my phone in a business like fashion, and I hardly play any games on it.
Speaking of which... It's one thing to try and get such a game to come to Windows Phone, but I seriously wonder if the batteries can actually cope with this :) There is a reason why Windows Phone hardly has any multi-taking.
Which apps would they be? Pokemon must be a tiny part of engaging with the world especially as it's so new to mobile OS. Unless you and your friends have been Pokemon crazy all these years. Not sure which apps aren't available that stop you engaging.
I remember having a nice, capable Nokia S60-based phone back in the day. It would support all manner of applications (they weren't called 'apps' then!), but there simply wasn't the developer base to create them or distribute them.
That problem disappeared when Microsoft announced they were buying Nokia - suddenly nobody bothered buying those phones anyway, so there was no desire for applications either.
Windows Phone has less than 1% marketshare. Those that made the mistake to buy one and expect app support should get a clue that they should have bought an iPhone or Android if they wanted to play the latest games. Windows Phone has had bad app support for the last 6 years.
I believe the 15% high was Italy a couple years ago. It was around 10% or more in quite a few European countries too, including the UK, France and Germany. I think they also had similar success in Russia and some South American countries.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-phone-sales-are-hitting-new-highs-but-market-share-falls-in-europe/
http://www.gsmarena.com/kantars_data_shows_windows_phone_ahead_of_ios_in_russia-news-14808.php
Oh for the heady days of my youth when a phone was a telecommunications device and games were played on computers, consoles or handhelds...
But how long until the first obliviot is run down because they ran in front of a car to catch some nonexistant creature on the other side of the road? Not that it will be the poor little idiot's fault for not paying attention, or the parents who are only too happy to have their darling little offspring wandering the street with an expensive piece of consumer electronics in their hands, or the supply chain who are happily counting their ten pieces of silver while the hapless motorist will once again be blamed for everything...
..the Windows OS is a nice OS, try it you may surprised! I really like mine and would choose it any day over a Android phone costing 10x the amount.
BUT
would I recommend you buy it? No.
The simple reason is, MS are just not saying in, laymans terms, "Yes, we are going to continue to develop it and will support it for X years".
It's the uncertainty that is really killing the phone, not the OS or the hardware.
MS will support it for as long as Windows 10 is supported. HP, Dell and others are currently producing hardware in support of windows mobile. Mobile isn't new to MS, I would have thought if MS thought mobile was a mistake then time and money would not have been spent creating an OS, supporting a Store and everything else that comes with app development. At worst the future will be as it is now whereby some android apps don't work on older versions, some uwp apps don't work on 8.1 and some future windows 11 apps (probably about a decade from now) won't work on windows 10.
MS will support it for as long as Windows 10 is supported.
Why do think that? These are two very different products.
HP, Dell and others are currently producing hardware in support of windows mobile.
Until all 200,000 people who want a windows phone have one.
> just 18% of Steams catalogue runs on Linux.
Well considering most of that is old dos games (granted some are good but might well run under Wine steam) or total self published crap like Don't **** your pants (real game) the 18% seems to mostly be the games I want to play like CS Go and XCom 2.
In all fairness my Linux Catalog of games includes borderlands 2 and the prequel, Grid autosport, the entire Valve catalogue, company of heroes 2 and planetary annihilations titans. not quite old or DOS based. And some are actually massive. And sorry to tell you but CS:GO and Xcom2 are in steam play so work in linux. I have CS:GO but don't have Xcom2.
I haven't touched anything like Wine or Cedega, I actually put on Vmplayer with Windows 7 so I can play older games in windows.
18% is a massive step up from five years ago when nothing ran in Linux. Steam is something like 70% of PC games sales, either directly or with the Steam key and is pushing not only Linux games but their own Linux flavour.
It isn't mainstream yet but future is looking rosy. As the OP said, "Times they are a changin'"
>And sorry to tell you but CS:GO and Xcom2 are in steam play so work in linux.
Read my reply again. I am actually agreeing with you totally. Admittedly my wording sucked but was saying even supposing the original posters number of 18% the other 82% are mostly old dos games and shovel ware. The new good stuff for the most part all runs on Steam Linux.
Because there's so much cloud and web these days, the apps are mostly platform agnostic and not locked up on one OS e.g. Windows.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, because its mobile market share is absolutely pathetic (despite spending a fortune since WP7 and then piggybacking on Nokia's carcass), developers are less inclined to make things for Windows, because it does not make economic sense.
The only thing Windows is good for is legacy stuff. Increasingly, Windows is nothing more than a glorified DOSBox. The irony is cruel, but hilarious and poetic.
Pokemon Go on Windows will not happen is my best guess.
Niantic (well funded by Google before being spun off for the Pokemon app) did all the ground work / proof of concept / crowd sourced data to allow pokestops & gyms to be created for Pokemon Go in the game Ingress release a few years ago and continually evolved
Ingress was android first, iphone followed later
There were many calls for that to be ported to Windows, which were ignored - if win phone was long term target there would have been windows ingress.
Obviously Pokemon Go has more money making potential than ingress, but given the low market share of win phone & the way ingress & pokemon go are resource hungry (external battery vital for any amount of extended play) and lots of win phones low spec, then if it was ported it would probably struggle on low end hardware anyway
"& the way ingress & pokemon go are resource hungry (external battery vital for any amount of extended play) and lots of win phones low spec, then if it was ported it would probably struggle on low end hardware anyway"
Except Win Phone frequently perform better on far lower spec hardware than their Android counterparts. Android is bloated and resource hungry. Breath of fresh air to use Windows Phone and be back to old Nokia style days of battery lasting days instead of hours.
A game is another matter of course, but for those games that do exist on WP (more than you think), they still generally drain the battery slower and yet show no sign of struggling on the hardware.
>Silverlight was actually a genuine competitor to Flash.
I enjoy taking the cigarette lighter to Redmond as much as the next guy but lets not pretend Flash is or has been anything but a friggin disaster (nothing but a cpu spinning malware portal guaranteed to hold the all time record for critical CVEs). Silverlight at least was less likely to get your computer owned but yeah death to plugins in general in the browser has been a good thing.
Plenty of non smart alternatives.for just voice / texts use.
Basic feature phones are cheap.
Even a few ultra simple, big button phones around designed for elderly / people with poor motor control.
But agree the smart phone market is very much android / apple with all others (win mo, sailfish, ubuntu phone OS etc.) as also rans. Biggest obstacle to "new" entrants in smart phone market is lack of apps as a big chunk of buyers expect to have apps for whatever social media etc stuff that they use