Windows 10 on Mobile under the scope: Flaws, confusion, and going nowhere fast

Are you serious, SatNad?

Store

The Store caused the biggest headaches in this build, with the update queue frequently getting stuck for many hours, with unresponsive controls. Reboots didn’t help.

Then overnight one night, the Store just unstuck itself. I didn’t find the Search very useful, the search term “rss” failed to show me the popular Nextgen Reader, but did show me lots of unwanted results in the Stores Music and Movies catalogs.

Music

Music has been given a rebrand, it’s now called “Groove”, but there isn’t much sign of progress yet in an area that Microsoft has neglected for years, and that could give it a few easy wins. The music app actually got worse in the shift to Windows 8 Phone, when the Zune software was ditched, and worse again in Windows Phone 8.1.

As an example of how messy things are today, the phone will sync .PLS (MP3 standard) playlists from some Microsoft apps but not others, and .WPL (Windows Media) playlists from some Microsoft apps but not others. Best of luck sorting which ones, though: the Windows Phone app for desktop and the Windows Phone app for Modern (aka TIFKAM) support different things.

Get into the Groove! People still say 'groovy' right?

You can now play back music copied to a OneDrive but you can’t create playlists on that OneDrive that any Microsoft app will understand.

To be fair to Microsoft, the word “sync” doesn’t appear anywhere on the blurb explaining this. And the Xbox Music Pass service, a fine but poorly promoted service, lingers on. Is it too much to ask that Microsoft hire competent people and make it a priority?