Windows 10 Mobile Build 10536 - Frustrating, Confusing and Crap

After several disappointing delays and some flogging in the blogs - MS released Windows 10 Mobile build 10536.  To be very specific the build is 10536.1004... I installed over build 10512 on a Lumia 735..

To get there was a very frustrating process.  It involved applying 3 major updates, 10514.0, then 10536.1000 and finally 10536.1004.    This ridiculously convoluted path was required because 10536.1004 would not install directly over 10512.   If you wanted to return to WP 8.1 and then update you could go direct to 10536 - but either path was a waste of time and effort and a lack of understanding on MS's part of their own Fast Ring Community.

While all 3 updates did apply - it took over 4 hours from the time I first checked for phone updates until everything downloaded and applied.  That is absurd - yes it is a test build - but the distribution and deployment should never take this long..

But then I noticed that most if not all my 3rd party apps were broken.  From Good Messaging, to Wells Fargo to Box.  

So I said okay - maybe a Phone reset will give me a clean 10536 base and then I can reinstall some apps.   Yeah Right...

The end result of the reset was 10536.1004 - but then it reinstalled all the old 8.1 and discontinued apps and removed all my 3rd party apps.  You then have to wait a bit then launch the store and manually check for updates which comes back with 30 updates that take upwards of an hour to install... and even then several apps did not install correctly or were missing...   

Then there are the missing pieces.  For me 10536.1004 did not include the Messages app - so text is now not working and guess what it's not in the store. It also did only included the News and Weather app - but when you selected the icon - what did it do but launch the store to install... Other posts discuss problems with WiFi, Cortana and other apps...   so basically a hot mess...

To me this whole process is completely unacceptable and proves to me that MS really doesn't get it.  

Personally I would much rather have MS release a new Windows 10 build via an image that I could apply via the Phone Recovery tool and in fact allow me to choose which build I want to install and whatever build I include should also include all of the proper native apps for that build - not rely on the store afterwards...
 
Also the fact that 10536 broke most of my 3rd party apps is also very disconcerting.  This tells me that the possibility of doing a clean upgrade when the "release" version is made public is not very good.

Bottom line to me is that 10536 is a crap build that MS should have never released.  I hope they release a new build soon...because they provide to mechanism to go back to 10512...only all the way back to 8.1...   

We are effectively 3 weeks away from the Big Bang event for MS new Surface 4 and Lumia phones.   While these all new devices have an all new base build on them and therefore not have to go through the upgrade process I expect that they may be better since Windows 10 was developed for them.   

But for the thousands of existing Lumia customers who were promised WP10 upgrades - I expect a lot of pain...

Some of that is already occuring as MS announced that Lumia 1020 owners can run WP10 but that their camera apps will not work correctly and MS is recommending returning to Windows 8.1 until a new Camera app can be released "later this fall".   

The poor execution on the part of the Windows 10 Phone team is just appalling and I do not have confidence in their ability to provide a proper upgrade to existing Lumia users...   

As with Windows 10 Desktop - I am part of a that group that thinks it's not really that great and WP10 is not any better...     Get your act together MS...

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