Welcome back to our weekly Windows 10 Mobile news recap series, where we go over the top stories of the past week in the world of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Let’s get started.
Third-party Pokemon Go client PoGo might make a comeback
These past couple of weeks have been an emotional roller coaster ride for would-be Pokemon Go players that make their home on Windows 10 Mobile. It seemed as if our prayers were answers back in the beginning of August when PoGo – a Windows 10 Mobile Pokemon Go client – hit the scene, but a radical change in Niantic’s API quickly made the project incompatible. We mourned the project as a wash, but it seems as if it might be coming back sometime soon. New builds of PoGo aren’t coming out until the API is “safe to use,” but we know now that the PoGo team is still hard at work to get us back to catching ’em all as soon as possible. Niantic hasn’t necessarily given us reason to trust that they’ll ever officially allow third party programs to exist for Pokemon Go, but we’ll take any hope we can get.
Google fixes, apologizes for Windows 10 Mail app problem
Last week, if you were trying to register a gmail account onto your Windows 10 Mail account, you were probably out of luck. A problem rose up not long ago that made it so that Gmail would no longer recognize Outlook as a “valid browser,” disqualifying it from logging into your gmail account and subsequently linking it to your Windows 10 Mobile device. Google has since apologized for the issue and fixed it, making sure that we all know the issue was “unintentional.” Now that the problem is solved, Google also encourages those who sought a workaround (allowing less secure apps to access Gmail) should set their account back to normal to keep their account safe.
Windows 10 Mobile market share plummets in India
If you’ve been disappointed by the poor sales that Windows 10 Mobile has had going in 2016, you won’t be made any happier by the results in India. We’ve got the numbers for Q2 2016’s mobile operating system market share in India, and they don’t look great for Windows 10 Mobile. To be fair the results were split into “Android”, “iOS”, and “Other” categories and never mentioned W10M by name, but the serious drop in market share for “Other” should give you an idea about how Microsoft’s mobile OS is faring. To give you an idea, from Q2 2015 to Q2 2016, the market share of “other” in India went from 5.5% all the way down to 0.5%.
Microsoft reaches out to Insiders to gauge interest in Continuum apps
Microsoft is drafting up their game plan. In order to get the most out of Continuum, the company sent out a wave of emails to a group of Windows 10 Mobile users, asking to see what sort of apps they might enjoy the most. The email asked users to rate a series of options (Apps for productivity at work, Apps for productivity at home, Apps for entertainment, Apps for social media, Games for Continuum) from 1 to 5 based on where they land on your priority list. The survey is meant to give Microsoft an idea of where they should be throwing resources in Continuum going forward, and should help them re-focus as we start to transition to 2017.
Builds from this week:
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Further reading: Microsoft, Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile
