Where is My Phone Update page will no longer be updated

Last year after the NoDo mishap, Microsoft started a Where's My Phone Update Page to give users delivery schedules of updates for carriers in United States and International Markets. Although this was some what significant for getting the schedules for the major Mango update, I personally found it not worth my time and it seems Microsoft does to.

In a recent blog post Eric Hautala, General Manager, Customer Experience Engineering, stated that there would be a few changes on how Microsoft would provide information about Windows Phone updates:

As we continue our growth, we won’t be individually detailing country, model, and carrier details on the Where’s My Phone Update? site any longer. And instead of my weekly blog posts, the official Windows Phone website will be the primary place for news and information about our updates, just as Microsoft Answers is there for your support questions.

First of all the schedule was vague and did not accurately represent if the update was actually been pushed to your device. There was no time frame given and even after the schedule been stated as "Delivering update" there were times the update was actually pushed two to four weeks down the line on my device. So basically I get the update when I get the update. To be honest I have personally not looked at that Where's My Phone Update for ages.

Secondly as the platform grows with more carriers and manufacturers it would be next to impossible keeping track of each manufacturer, carrier and country as updates roll out differ from country to country, carrier to carrier and oem to oem.

Thirdly certain updates may not be pushed to your device by your carrier. In other words they might choose not to. There are cost involved for testing each update. A carrier may find it economical to roll out less frequent updates. Since all updates are sequential, it means that if a carrier decides to not push a specific update, that update would be bundled in the next update a carrier decides to roll out. So rest assured your phone will get updated to the latest build.  This same concept also makes sense with manufacturers for sim free devices. This is why my Lumia 800 has not received the recent 8107 update. Nokia already had schedule a bug fix update around mid to end Jan regarding the battery issue. So probably both the battery fix and the 8107 update in one pack would be pushed to my device around mid to end Jan, instead of two separate updates.

Lastly certain updates which I received over the year were not even mentioned in the blog or schedule. So as far as I know the schedule did not cover manufacturer specific updates. One good example of this would be when HTC pushed the tethering update to my old HTC HD7 device, the update which enabled tethering. Before this roll out another HTC specific update was pushed which was not documented either on the Windows Blog or was included in the schedule. Practically the page did not make any sense for many people and I guess is not worth the resources from Microsoft's point of view.