Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform App Dream Is Dead and Buried

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft has spent years pushing developers to create special apps for the company's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and today, it's putting the final nail in the UWP coffin. Microsoft is finally allowing game developers to bring full native Win32 games to the Microsoft Store, meaning the many games that developers publish on popular stores like Steam don't have to be rebuilt for UWP.

This is a big shift for Microsoft's Windows app store, particularly because games are one of the most popular forms of apps that are downloaded from app stores. Previously, developers were forced to publish games for Windows 10 through the Universal Windows Platform, which simply doesn't have the same level of customization that game developers have come to expect from Windows over the years. The writing has been on the wall for UWP for months now. Microsoft recently revealed its effort to switch the company's Edge browser to Chromium and away from UWP to make it available on Windows 7, Windows 8, and macOS. Microsoft's Joe Belfiore admitted in an interview with The Verge earlier this month that UWP was a 'headwind' for Edge. 'It's not that UWP is bad, but UWP is not a 35-year-old mature platform that a ridiculously huge amount of apps have been written to,' Belfiore said at the time. Microsoft even recently put its touch-friendly UWP versions of Office on hold, preferring to focus on the web, iOS, Android, and its desktop apps instead. Office was always the centerpiece for UWP and a good example of how to build a more demanding app on Microsoft's new platform. Microsoft is finally listening to app and game developers and not trying to force UWP on them anymore. 'Ultimately, this is good news for both developers and Windows users,' the report concludes. 'We might now start to see more games in the Microsoft Store that work how PC gamers expect them to and hopefully more apps.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.