Microsoft Developer Evangelist Retracts Windows Phone 8 Statement

Over the past few days we’ve heard conflicting reports about Windows Phone 8 on current Windows Phones. The issue came from a Microsoft developer evangelist who said that all current phones will receive Windows Phone 8.

Today that developer evangelist has retracted his statements.

In an MSDN blog post, Nuna Silva admits that his statement was wrong. According to Silva, “the point I was attempting to make was simply that existing Windows Phone applications will run on the next version of Windows Phone.” He goes on to say that he “mistakenly confused app compatibility with phone updateability, which caused the rumors we saw yesterday.”

Now we’re back to Microsoft’s original statement, which was that current Windows Phone apps will run on the next version of Windows Phone. Developers don’t need to worry about making sure their current apps are ready by the time Windows Phone 8 Apollo launches, everything will still work.

Microsoft hasn’t said anything about is the ability to update current phones to Windows Phone 8 Apollo. Rumors say that Microsoft has no plans to update current phones to the new version of the OS, and Microsoft hasn’t said anything to outright deny the rumor.

This retraction could mean bad news for Windows Phone users, especially the ones that just bought the Nokia Lumia 900. Users expect long-term support for flagship phones, but here there’s a chance that Microsoft will leave the Lumia 900 on Windows Phone 7.5 while new phones go on to Windows Phone 8. Hopefully the rumors aren’t entirely true, or else there will be a lot of upset Lumia owners when Windows Phone 8 rolls out.