I'm not sure why paying developers is a problem to bootstrap the ecosystem. Although, if they were paying for temple run (as the image might suggest) that seems odd. Mostly because presumably they should be targeting the apps everyone uses that don't have good replacements (aka netflix/prime streaming/etc).
I would guess that they aren't the only ones. Do you think LG/Sony/Samsung/roku/apple tv/firestic/etc all got the netflix app ported for free? Maybe. Plex probably isn't getting paid, and they do it too..
But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.
> But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.
Their (forward) app compatibility was actually very good. I wrote a WP7 Silverlight app in 2011 that still works on the last release of Windows Mobile 10.
But that was basically quite late in the game, microsoft had been making a phone OS's for ~ a decade at that point. In 2011 it seemed like MS was already putting it on life support.
I would guess that they aren't the only ones. Do you think LG/Sony/Samsung/roku/apple tv/firestic/etc all got the netflix app ported for free? Maybe. Plex probably isn't getting paid, and they do it too..
But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.