Anybody noticed the sudden demand for WP8.1 in the community

As it says on the tin. Why do you think that is? Perhaps because their phones are really cheap?

Honestly I have not seen any rise with it. A few people have posted about it with questions here, but the market itself is still bad in comparison to the others.

Personally I jumped in on it early and have since left it behind. The store was a pain to work with, and the market share is insignificant. About 3% of the market is windows phone in America. Even less in other countries. That number has been going down for a good while now. http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/ ... ket-share/

Some new construct users might be interested, but globally it is on a decline.

Yeah, I know the market share is bad. However, since I have been answer a lot of wp8.1 questions in the how to thread recently, I was wondering if their very recent 'cheap device' campaign had been mildly successful. That site you linked shows stats from Nov 2014.

I'm not sure if the audio memory leaking bug is resolved yet. Saw few post about this and I'm not going to invest my time on this platform until it is stable. Maybe Windows 10 ?

This bug: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedbackdetail/view/970180/audio-crashes-windows-phone-html5-games is still a major blocker for HTML5 games on WP8.1.

WP8.1 only got updated to consumer devices a few months ago so that might explain the rise in interest.

I know my interest in the platform came back with wp8.1. My games went from not playable lag and no sound to 60fps smooth as butter an great sound

I've actually read some really positive opinions of wp8. Unfortunately, they just didn't sell. Kind of sad that microsoft actually made a good mobile OS from scratch, then flopped in the market.

Platform-agnostic development like C2 is great for emerging platforms, but they can't expect us to go to a lot of effort to make things work if the market share is that tiny. :/

That and they still lack support for WP8.1 PubCenter for use with winjs. So it means they don't provide a way to use them their own advertising agent for apps based off html. Luckily with Cordova we can (probably) use AdMob instead.

My 'feeling' is they have sold a load of cheap WP8.1 phones this holiday. As they are selling them around the £100 mark which is dirt cheap.