It makes me really sad that Microsoft gave up on the windows phone as it had the best user interface and the performance was great. It was an easy to use third option to Android and IOS. Although not open source.
2 more years and Postmarket OS will be just as old as the windows phone was when it shutdown.
What most people didn’t get tho was that the mobile internet actually worked on WP, so you didn’t actually need all the missing apps. You could actually use web sites. That said, all MS had to do was allow Android apps to work on WP, but they were too damn stubborn.
Through an emulator, which would be even slower than the app running on an Android phone of the time, ruining the smooth WP experience? By making Windows Phone an Android skin?
Project Astoria was the last option I know of, apps ran natively.