Above: Microsoft’s Lumia 550. Photo courtesy Microsoft.
Support for Windows 10 Mobile will end in December 2019, the final epitaph for the mobile OS that could, but in the end, didn’t.
Windows 10 Mobile has been in “servicing” mode since late 2017, receiving security updates, but the platform has not had the uptake necessary from developers to make it viable in a competitive mobile development environment.
Microsoft bought the phone assets of Nokia in 2015 for an estimated US$8 billion, but over the last five years was unable to make the combined platform of Nokia hardware and Windows for mobile attractive to either customers or developers.
At one point, the company announced Project Astoria, which was supposed to create a runtime environment for Android software. That solution was shut down within a year.
