Honestly, the developer experience was shit.

They tried to leverage their decades of prior investment and use it as an advantage, but what it actually felt like was a wobbly Jenga tower where every little thing had a caveat and no clear happy path.

Contrast that with iOS, where it felt like they basically started from scratch.

I think Microsoft thought they were lowering the barrier to entry by allowing existing WinForms, ASP.NET, and Silverlight (lol) devs to reuse their stuff, but in practice it made it harder to get started. Every app felt like a legacy codebase from the jump.