As the world gets used to Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8 operating system, an increasingly common observation is the lack of notification centre. However, rather than being a deliberate ploy by Microsoft, it’s emerged that one was planned but the company ran out of time.

Both Android and iOS devices use notification centres, alerting users to messages, updates, emails and the like via a dropdown menu that generally sits at the top of the display.

That both Google and Apple’s operating systems use one makes the omission all the more obvious when using a Windows Phone 8 device.

Speaking at its BUILD conference on a session all about notifications, Thomas Fennel, Microsoft’s program manager, admitted the initial plan was to include a notifications hub, but they didn’t “because we ran out of time”.

Having initially announced Windows Phone 8 way back in June before unveiling the final version on 29 October, we’d have thought this would have been plenty of time to implement some kind of solution. 

As it is Windows Phone 8 consumers will need to rely on the Live Tile interface to alert them to any notifications, at least for the time being.

Fennel did suggest that a dedicated notification hub might be added to Windows Phone 8 in the future.