Do you realize what you just shrugged of more or less killed Windows phone???

When WP needed 3rd party games to have a chance in the consumer market Microsoft killed their fully functioning and very popular xna platform without explanation. For a while there was no replacement and the standard response from Microsoft was silence.

Later Microsoft pointed to mono as a replacement. At that time, mono was slow, buggy and incomplete. In fact, for a long time mono was missing the asset pipeline tools. According to their official tutorials you had to dig up an old copy of xna and use their asset tools.

I still own two devices, yes Microsoft failed to capture the market, even though they managed to achieve around 10% in Europe.

UWP was never about Windows Phone only, rather Windows Phone, HoloLens, XBox ONE, 2-1 devices and Windows 10 desktops.

So Windows Phone failed, plenty of scenarios still available on Windows 10 deployments.

And the number of companies who care about any of those platforms are vanishingly small.

How many companies that still care about the desktop at all are going to invest resources in Windows only frameworks and not something like Electron? How many of those that are writing native Windows apps are going to use UWP instead of Win32?

Plenty of them across Europe to keep me and other devs busy until retirement.

macOS is largely insignificant in many countries over here outside iOS shops, GNU/Linux hardly matters for consumers, the Web still fails short of many native scenarios and mobile devices are mainly for consumption.

I agree that native Mac software is insignificant, desktop software is insignificant to most consumers period. Except for apps made by Microsoft,Adobe, and who else besides game makers are making software for PCs?

I’m nowhere near Silicon Valley, but I can say that hardly any money is going into desktop software development. Companies are following Microsoft’s lead. Even c# shops are strategizing how to get rid of their Windows dependencies by going to .Net Core.

Plenty of factory automation, medical research device companies, control panels for car monitoring devices, ticket selling machines, and lots of IoT devices deployed with Windows only UIs, some of them now migrating from Windows Embedded into IoT Core variants.