Okay, so i'm going to make another longpost, but this is a really weird one and it may or may not be worth it depending on if you're a deranged tech enthusiast like I am.
I want to, for the entirety of October, use a Windows Phone - a Lumia 950 - as my daily driver.
I have a lot of fondness of the Windows Phone platform. It's where I cut my teeth on C#, and I used it up until 2018 when Groove Music shut down and we were forced to Spotify, only for Spotify to be perpetually in Maintenance mode (and not functioning at the time.) It sucked!
[A good 80% of the app tiles you see here straight up don't work or aren't present anymore]
I just loved the ecosystem, the keyboard felt great, the system was snappy, I didn't really mind the lack of app support, but in modern times Microsoft has effectively shelved the Windows Store on the platform and all that's left are small vestiges of what-used-to-be.
...Okay, but why put yourself through this?
Long story short, I want to get better at app development as a whole. The details of this self-challenge are:
- I can only use my Lumia 950 for the month.
- If I need an app, I create the app.
That's kind of it.
The Challenges Already Presenting Themselves
So I picked up a Lumia 950 off eBay in pretty good condition. In box too! I booted it up and.... its Chinese AND its a Dual SIM Lumia 950????? I could have sworn only the 950 XL was Dual SIM? What the fuck. Anyway. I uninstalled the Chinese preloaded apps and tied my MSA (Microsoft Account) to the device as usual. The phone is egregiously slow. For context, I picked up a 950XL last year hoping to do the same challenge only for AT&T - my carrier - to not support it? The phone supports 4G LTE, what the fuck. But it supports the Lumia 950? How does that freaking make sense? What the fuck. Anyway. The 950XL was as performant as I remembered it but this one?? It's... It takes SO LONG to do the simplest thing. The 950 has a MSM8992 Snapdragon and the 950 XL has a MSM8994, there's a .1 GHz difference between the processor cores.... Maybe the A57 cores having a .2 GHz difference is the factor? That doesn't make sense though....
Okay, okay, whatever, fine. I load up whatever from my Apps library is still around. Turns out, there's quite a bit that's still online and available? Not everything works, granted, but like... I can read my ebooks with Cover, I can use Unicord for Discord, I can sideload a Twitter PWA to run Twitter. Wingotag for Instagram works surprisingly well? I don't have access to Facebook Messenger at all. That's gonna sting a bit, I use it heavily, but uhhhh. we'll see what we can do.
Oh, and Microsoft broke syncing for Outlook email and calendar. Those are like THE most important things for a phone to have....
Are you actually going through with this....?
I'm not sure yet. I might just do this as a hobby project rather than torture myself for an entire month. Maybe I can work on setting the stage for this (arguably stupid) challenge. It seems fun! But I know that it's going to be a battle of attrition no matter what I do. Honestly I just need to remember the good times with the Windows Phone platform and just kinda move on lol.
I'm stubborn.