r/windowsphone

I know that majority or all devices running windows phone 8 and 10 mobile are lumias but, why doesn't the other devices running windows phone 7 get attention? Me personally favor lumias too but is it harder to jailbreak or is it just preference?

https://preview.redd.it/9q0zh9tlrfbh1.png?width=883&format=png&auto=webp&s=706eab7dc6d1374bcc5225e23ae6f606b141e06c

Using both desktop\wp patched MixRadio is actually so good to use in both my lumia and my laptop (soon windows tablet,once i install the patched app on it)

The lumia on the front of the screen is an 625!

Hey everyone,

I have been reading through this sub for a while and I am genuinely fascinated by how much is still happening here despite official support ending years ago. I come from a background of retro and analog tech tinkering, things like Rockbox on old DAPs, e-ink readers, mechanical typewriters, so Windows Phone feels like exactly the kind of ecosystem that looks dead on paper but is actually still alive underneath.

I am thinking about picking up a cheap used Lumia as a weekend project, not to daily drive it, but to actually understand what is realistically still possible with it today. That is really my main question. For those of you still using or tinkering with these phones in 2026, what actually still works? Can you still send and receive texts and calls normally on a current carrier network, or has that gotten harder too? Is there any messaging app that still functions, even an unofficial or homebrew client, or is texting and calling genuinely the only reliable communication left? Do local features like camera, music playback, alarms, and offline apps still hold up fine, or have even those degraded over time due to missing updates?

I would also love to know which Lumia model is the best starting point, something that offers a good balance of availability, community support, and being interesting to experiment with, similar to how certain Android models get recommended for custom ROM work.

I have seen mentions of unofficial Store replacements and community built apps, things like Telegram clients or alternative browsers, so I am curious how active the homebrew scene really is, and whether there is a central hub, a Discord, a forum, or a GitHub organization where most of this development is happening now.

Finally, for people who have been through this already, what is the honest split between interesting technical exercise and genuinely usable device in 2026? I am not expecting banking apps or two factor authentication to work, but I would like to know exactly where the line sits today.

Any resources, guides, or even just a starting point would be hugely appreciated. Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to reply.

i have this lumia 635 (it's the 1gb ram model) that i'm trying to update from windows phone 8.1 to windows 10 mobile using fadilfadz01's universal updater tool. the first time i tried it, it was successful, but then i tried updating it some more and it was an epic fail that got my phone stuck in sad face mode (i think it was cuz i tried doing the second update from the phone's windows update menu rather than from the universal updater tool). i had to use wpi to flash it back to the original os and hoped i could try again, but every time i tried it again, i wait like half an hour for the tool to download the update package, i look at my phone's update menu, the progress bar goes up for a bit, and then it just says "the update was downloaded. but couldn't be opened. (80096010)". this is really odd because like i said it worked fine the first time around. how do i fix this error and get it to update properly again?

Hey so what kind of stuff could you actually run on Astoria? Like I have this old android game and im curious if it would run but idk...

If Astoria even works at all, I know basically nothing about it other then that it was scrapped

When i try to download WPinternals i get an error saying that a piece of visual studio 2012 is missing.What should i do?

I need to know

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share another update on the Lumia 1520 project because we finally crossed a milestone that honestly felt impossible a couple of weeks ago.

For anyone that hasn't seen my previous posts, the goal isn't just to "install Android." I'm trying to bring modern Linux/postmarketOS support to the Lumia 1520 so the phone can have a second life.

Over the last couple of weeks I've had to build a lot of things that simply didn't exist for this device:

• Wrote a new device tree for the Lumia 1520 (RM-940)
• Added Lumia 1520 support to lk2nd
• Built and tested custom bootloaders
• Fixed memory relocation issues that were preventing Linux from even starting
• Built a custom postmarketOS device package
• Got the Linux kernel loading and executing on real hardware

The exciting part is that today we finally reached the postmarketOS debug shell on the actual device. There is still a lot left to do before I'd call this usable, but seeing a Linux shell running on a Lumia 1520 is something I wasn't sure I was gonna be able to do.

https://preview.redd.it/2904oq6zd7bh1.jpg?width=1152&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eca3e67b29a6b8eb5fba18d9d0ebe795da15b987

This has turned into a much bigger project than I originally expected, but it's been incredibly rewarding.

I saw that 8.1 gets more apps, new clients, new fixes.. and Windows 10 Mobile doesn't. Why so? We're a little community, why do we have to divide everything in half because of some OS versions? that are from the same company btw. doesn't make sense.