Windows 10: Windows Phone Keeps Losing Users in the United States,...

This is pretty obvious as to why this is so in the US but not so much elsewhere. Here in the States, we have three major evils, att, Verizon, and T-Mobile/Sprint. One major evil recently (Verizon) took literally all their time to get the Lumia Cyan updates and such out when everyone and their grandmother had those updates already. Why? They wanted a new bootscreen and to have all their crummy, not-up-to-date apps to work flawlessly on 8.1. att is lesser of an evil but that will be discussed later. The other evil doesn't have much market to cover.

Then there's the mother of all evils, the lack of new hardware, that is on the higher end and targeted for the US. The Lumia 930 can't carry flagship status, the HTC M8 is the current flagship and neither are really, flagshippy to say the least. It's like the Lumia 920 that had all this and that and wow'ed quite a few. Microsoft is screwing up their hardware releases as there are literally almost three different Lumia 53x or 63x in each category of devices. Nokia was brilliant at releasing a 1020, 1520, 1320, 920, 820, 720, 620, and 520 with very few variants only intended for US carrier variants (read first part). Each and every increment in the numbering was a device meant to fill a niche. The 920 was the can-do do-all handset with everything lower being intended for their respective markets. A 520 is a great starter device, a 920 is a perfect flagship, the 1020 is a perfect shutterbug's favorite. Microsoft however, is just throwing all sorts of crap at the wall. The Lumia 530, 535, and 532 have very few differences, only one major being RAM amounts. Now there's a Lumia 435 (which is ironic because I had the thought recently of them making a Lumia 4xx category to fill in the elder Nokia Asha void) that isn't very differential from the lower end.

They're racing towards the bottom for handsets meant for developing countries with handsets that have dual SIMs yet contractility have absolutely no support for those different countries such as Cortana being US only for several months, Xbox Live updates not being available outside the US, Xbox Music and everything else releasing in the US only and then maybe elsewhere.

That's called shooting yourself in the foot.

The Achilles' heel here however in the US, disregarding everything else, is the lack of major apps and lack of quality from them. Instagram BETA is still beta after WELL over a year, Audible is going to have an update in the works 14 months after their last update, snapchat isn't even on Windows Phone officially; that's a major detractor. There are better third party alternatives for most top apps, but things can fall apart when the backend of those services updates their stuff. But then there's the chicken and the egg issue, you can't get apps with no users and you can't get users with no apps.

It almost makes me want to start a group of vigilante developers just to solve that issue.