Microsoft Lumia

» see microsoft.com/lumia as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

microsoft lumia's peak years overlap with my time on android, more or less, but the lumia store was never the store i was opening. by 2014 my phone was already a samsung galaxy from a turkcell display window and the apps i used (whatsapp and instagram, plus whatever google maps thing was current) were all built for android first and ios second. windows phone was the third checkbox on developer release notes, when it was a checkbox at all. honestly, that gap is what eventually killed the platform, but i was on the wrong side of it the whole time anyway.

microsoft closed the $7.2 billion nokia devices and services acquisition on april 25 2014, taking over the lumia hardware operation that nokia had run out of espoo since 2011. the nokia brand was contractually retired from new phones almost immediately. the lumia 535 in november 2014 was the first device launched under microsoft's name, a dual-sim mid-range handset aimed at the markets where lumia had any traction. mostly latin america plus thin pockets of india. honestly, the device was fine, the operating system was the problem.

windows phone 8.1 had launched in april 2014 with the cortana voice assistant and a notification center that finally caught up to what android and ios had shipped years earlier. the platform was around 3% global smartphone share at the moment of the acquisition and never went higher. by mid 2015 the share was under 2%, by mid 2016 under 1%. the lumia 650 in february 2016 was the last device under the brand, a low-end office-focused handset that no consumer was buying. microsoft wrote down $7.6 billion in july 2015 (more than the full acquisition price) and laid off 7,800 mobile employees, and by october 2017 terry myerson confirmed on twitter that windows 10 mobile was in maintenance mode with no new features coming. the brand died with that tweet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the lumia hardware itself was genuinely good. the lumia 1020 from july 2013 had a 41 megapixel camera sensor that no flagship would match until the huawei p20 pro five years later. the lumia 950 in 2015 had iris-recognition unlock and continuum, the dock that let you plug the phone into a monitor and use it like a desktop. the live tile home screen was a coherent design idea that microsoft built across windows 8 and windows phone 8 and then never quite let go of. on paper this was a real third smartphone platform. in practice the app store was a graveyard, the official instagram app was a third-party reskin for three years. snapchat refused to ship a windows version at all, and most non-us banking apps were missing or six versions behind.

~ how it ended ~

the actual end was administrative, not dramatic. microsoft mobile (the post-acquisition entity that held the lumia operation) was dissolved by 2016, with the brand and the os entering a 30-month security-only maintenance window. the october 8 2017 tweet from terry myerson and joe belfiore was the public confirmation, but the death had already been logged in q2 2016 when nokia / microsoft sold the feature-phone business to foxconn for $350 million. windows phone got its last security update on december 10 2019. honestly, after that the few remaining users either rooted their devices or moved on. the lumia name was retired and microsoft never tried hardware-and-software phones again, not under its own brand at least.

~ the long tail ~

the surface duo in 2020 was microsoft's next try, an android-running dual-screen device that ran for two generations before being killed in 2023. the lumia ip went nowhere. the cortana brand survived on windows desktop for a few more years before getting deprecated in 2023, the live tile design language stayed in windows 8 and was reversed out of windows 10. some of the lumia camera engineering work resurfaced inside the surface phone rumors that never shipped. honestly, the most lasting trace of the lumia line is that for about two years the new york times tech section ran phone-review columns where the lumia 1020 was the camera benchmark every flagship had to beat. you can still find boxed lumia 950s on ebay for under fifty dollars, with the continuum dock as a separate accessory that nobody buys.

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