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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 11 2019, @11:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the cancelled-the-beta dept.

Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32:

Years ago — back before the launch of Windows 8 — Microsoft announced that going forward, app development would be driven by fundamentally different rules and capabilities than what had been the case before. Applications distributed via the Windows Store would be written to new standards, with new rules about what data they could access and which languages were supported. Older Win32 apps would still run, but they were ultimately intended to be replaced by an entirely new suite of applications written under new design rules, and distributed through the Windows Store.

Pretty much none of this actually happened. The Windows Store went on to become a dead-letter trainwreck of applications no one wanted or used. It was stuffed with counterfeit apps for applications like Facebook that pretended to be genuine products. Microsoft recently removed its own Office installer from the Windows Store. Over the years, Microsoft has tried rebranding its own software development push in various ways, but none of it has sparked much interest in creating UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps. Now, the company is taking multiple steps to allow Win32 applications to take advantage of the same features it's rolled out for UWP in the past. While Microsoft isn't admitting defeat in its effort to push everyone into using the Windows Store, that's what this practically amounts to.

"You've told us that you would like us to continue to decouple many parts of the Universal Windows Platform so that you can adopt them incrementally," Microsoft corporate vice president Kevin Gallo wrote this week, in a developer-centric blog post. "Allowing you to use our platform and tools to meet you where your customers are going – empowering you to deliver rich, intelligent experiences that put people at the center."

But doesn't everyone want a program that plays for sure on Windows?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:57AM (1 child)

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:57AM (#842588) Homepage

    And the first thing I did with the seldom-used Win10 box was banish everything that looked like a Store, restore the Classic menu, and promptly forget that Win10's reason for existence was to sell apps from the Windows Store.

    Hey Microsoft, repeat after me: the desktop is not a cellphone!

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:44PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:44PM (#842784)

    I could never get the Windows store to work. I typed sudo apt-get install programname and just get an error.