It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.

Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited.

I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore.

[1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8)

[2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...

Windows Phone 7 was artificially limited crap, any amount of head start wouldn't help it.