What Needs To Be Fixed in Windows Phone

I had the chance to try out Windows Phone a few weeks ago. I came away very pleasantly surprised. It is elegant and simple without feeling like it is lacking any features. In fact, many features that require apps on other platforms are built into the OS on Windows Phone. This leads to a nice speed advantage at certain tasks, namely social sharing features.

However, there is one feature that kept me from making the switch (reverse switch?) from Apple to Microsoft. Notifications are terrible on Windows Phone. Notifications happen in two ways. First, is through the Live Tiles that are the face of Windows Phone. The home screen on Windows Phone is a series of squares and rectangles that you get to customize. Kind of like Widgets on Android,they can show updated information like weather or mail notifications. Some apps, will show updates on the tile. One could imagine a Twitter app that shows a number for new @ replies or DMs. The second type of notification is a bar that comes down from the top, in an identical manner to iOS if something happens. For example, if someone posts on your Facebook wall a pop down appears for about 10 seconds saying “Joe Smith posted on your Wall”. You could click this banner and get taken to the post in the Facebook App.

The problem is that Windows Phone doesn’t store old notifications. In iOS, if you miss that banner, you can just pull down from the top and see a list of your missed notifications. You cannot do this in Windows Phone. If you miss a notification, it simply disappears into the ether! Did you win that item you were bidding on in eBay? Did you get pinged about a new job on LinkedIn? Hope you open the app in the near future bc if you miss the notification you have no idea.

I suppose Microsoft’s solution is that you add a Live Tile and get the tile to update you next time you look at your phone. But if I think about all the things that notify me on my iPhone – news apps, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Skype, eBay, ESPN – I don’t want ALL of these tiles to be on the Home Screen. It kind of defeats the purpose.

Even the original iPhone system of notifications, where you got a pop up that you had to act on – dismiss/ok/open/whatever – at least notified you that something was going on. That should be the chief concern of a notification system in an OS. I have it set to notify me because I want to see this when something happens the next time I look at my phone. Windows Phone flat out fails at this. It is the most glaring example of what separates the otherwise fantastic OS from its competition.