Thinking About the Future of UWP, Windows Store, and Windows 10 S (Premium)

While I was in Haarlem last week, someone asked me about the future of UWP and Store apps. This is a topic I think about all the time, as it turns out. But I’ve been obsessing over this more than usual over the past few days.

And I think I’ve finally found an answer that makes sense.

There’s a lot of background to understand before we can proceed, however. So I’ll try to be as brief as possible as we’ve certainly covered this ground a lot in the past already. But it’s important to understand the full story.

As you may recall, Microsoft hasn’t created a successful new client platform in over 20 years. I’ve often pegged this malady to the overly-lengthy Longhorn development period, which drew to a close on the eve of modern smartphone era with the introduction of the iPhone.

In these two products—Longhorn/Windows Vista and the iPhone—we can clearly see the biggest transition that has ever gripped our industry, as we moved from traditional PC form factors and Microsoft dominance to a mobile first, cloud first world in which other hardware platforms—Android and iOS—reign supreme and Microsoft plays but a part.

That Microsoft’s most ardent fans are still struggling with this reality is another story. More relevant is that Microsoft, of course, struggled to accept this change as well. But the software giant has done a fairly amazing job of adapting over time, first under Steve Ballmer, and then with Satya Nadella, to the new normal. And the Microsoft of today is nothing like the backwards-facing company that created Longhorn.

But transitions are, well, transitions. Not hard stops. The successful products of the past don’t just disappear overnight. They adapt and evolve. I often use Office as the poster child of this change: Today, Office has brought its traditional applications and server products to the cloud with Office 365, and it has evolved with new mobile and web apps that meet the needs of today, not the norms of the past. Windows Server is making a similar transition thanks to the Azure family of products and services.

Windows has proven a bit trickier, however. On the one hand, Microsoft moved quickly to adapt its once-core product line to the touch-first mobile world. But on the other, it did so with Windows 8, a horribly flawed design that disrespected the user base and their needs at exactly the wrong time in history.

And then there’s Windows phone, which seemed like a great idea even though it was ultimately proven to be half-baked and poorly designed, and was released years too late. Here we see the death throes of a once-proud platform maker. It was hard to watch.

Microsoft’s mobile stumbles were so bad, in fact, that it will be paying for those mistakes for years to come. But let’s be fair: Two out of three ain’t bad, and with Azure and Office 365, we do see the real future of the company, as a cloud services company.

But again, transitions are not hard stops. Microsoft can’t just declare that Windows has no future and give up. There’s an audience of 1 billion to 1.5 billion people out there using some version of the product. It’s in use at virtually all Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft’s core audience, a group so slow moving that Windows will have a home, and a place, for decades to come no matter what the software giant does.

That Microsoft has decided to fight this fate is both laudable and ludicrous. I guess it’s a matter of perspective. But as a Windows fan and user, I applaud most of the changes Microsoft has brought with Windows 10, especially, and how it’s largely turned the corner on that Windows 8 disaster. (I also see troubling missteps, of course, like the piling on of completely unnecessary new features in each Windows 10 version, and the horrible and nagging in-box advertising. But let’s not judge that part of the strategy for now.)

Like it or loathe it, part of Microsoft’s strategy of staving off the inevitable decline of Windows is to foist yet another apps platform on its users. Its name is Legion, but today we call this platform the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). And as you know, apps built on this platform are delivered to customers via the Windows Store. Both are meant to bring mobile device user experiences to Microsoft’s traditional PC OS. And both have, thus far, failed miserably.

Microsoft hopes that UWP and Windows Store will eventually replace its aging previous apps platforms, like Win32 and .NET. Microsoft’s users, for the most part, hope that they will not. And that’s the trouble with Windows today: All of the useful apps we use are built to Win32/.NET or similar. But they are unsafe, have performance and reliability issues, and are hard for developers to create. Meanwhile, Microsoft has this modern platform that solves these issues. But there’s no such thing as a must-have UWP app, not even one. I’ll remind you that this platform essentially debuted in 2012, five long years ago.

So Microsoft has adapted. Aside from changing the name of the platform several times and updating it with new capabilities over the intervening years, Microsoft has also done everything it can do to help developers bring their existing code—apps, services, whatever—to UWP and the Windows Store. And I mean everything.

The most obvious examples of this work are the so-called “bridge” technologies for iOS developers, web developers, and Windows desktop application developers. (A similar effort aimed at Android developers was canned for essentially political reasons; because Android apps can run so well on top of Windows, this bridge would have actually harmed UWP/Windows Store, not helped it.) The result is a hodgepodge of app types, each delivered through the Windows Store. And now, years later, we see the start of some trends that, I think, speak to how the Windows Store can be successful moving forward.

But first, a word about the pedantic nature of this conversation.

Apps delivered through the Windows Store are called Windows Store apps. Period.

These apps can be built to UWP, and Microsoft’s initial vision was that all Windows Store apps would be UWP apps. So these terms—Windows Store apps and UWP apps—were once synonyms. But even though that is no longer the case, people still often use them interchangeably. This drives technical people nuts because everything drives technical people nuts. But the important bit is that normal people—most people—only need to worry about the term Windows Store apps.

Anyway, those bridge technologies allow developers to package their non-UWP apps in what is essentially a UWP “wrapper” or container. It’s called App-X, not that it matters, and it debuted with Windows phone, which is only interesting from a historical perspective.

The most successful bridge technology, to date, is called the Desktop Bridge. It was previously code-named Centennial, and it allows developers that will never re-create their legacy desktop applications in UWP to bring these apps to the Store. Some developers simply “wrap” their desktop apps in that App-X container and deliver them as-is. But they can also optionally integrate various UWP features—like notifications, live tiles, and so on—too, making them more powerful on Windows 10, and more useful to Windows 10 users.

And there are actually a handful of high-profile Desktop Bridge apps in the Store today: Adobe Photoshop Elements 15. Evernote. Spotify. And, soon, Apple iTunes.

When I was asked about the future of UWP and the Windows Store last week, I discussed the Desktop Bridge. And I noted that I believed that non-UWP apps in the Store would be what put Windows Store over the top. That is, Microsoft will likely never see much traction with “pure” UWP because most new app development is happening these days on mobile (Android/iOS) and the web. But the bridge technologies, especially Desktop Bridge, would help bring the best existing apps—from the desktop, iOS, or the web—-to Windows 10 in a way that is safe and reliable.

(I should briefly point out that Xbox Play Anywhere titles are another minor high point for Windows Store. Whether you view these cross-platform-compatible games as “pure” UWP or not is sort of beside the point, but they are a special case regardless. They are, in the end, another kind of Windows Store app.)

But I also spent a lot of time last week using Windows 10 S on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop. And trying to deal with the limitations that this new Windows product edition inflicts on the user. When you use Windows 10 S, you can only install Windows Store apps. Not desktop applications.

You can see now, perhaps, why the Windows Store apps naming is important. It’s not just UWP apps that work in Windows 10 S. It’s (basically) all Windows Store apps, including Desktop Bridge apps.

But I’m left wondering if Microsoft could do more.

For example, Google Chrome is a sticking point for many. This is a classic Win32 desktop application that will likely never be ported to the Windows Store, and for a number of reasons. One is that Microsoft requires any Store-based web browsers to utilize the Microsoft Edge rendering engine. And while Google makes that concession on iOS, where its Chrome mobile app must use the Safari rendering engine, it does so because there are one billion of its users there. With Windows, Google can (and does) simply make one version of its app that works everywhere. Not just Windows 10, but Windows 7 and 8.x too.

So maybe Microsoft could make a concession or two.

Maybe it could, for example, allow Google to package Chrome for Windows Store and keep using its own rendering engine. I asked Microsoft officials about this possibility at Build last month and was (literally) laughed at. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that concessions in this area are key to the future of Windows Store, and thus to Windows 10 S. And I’m going to offer up something that is even more radical than a one-off concession to browser makers.

Here’s what made me think of this.

When I arrived home from The Netherlands on Friday, I started powering on various PCs and getting them up-to-date. Among these PCs is a MacBook Air running the macOS High Sierra beta, and Apple released a second beta while I was away, so I set about getting that (and related betas, like Xcode 9.x) installed.

While that was happening, I came across a news story I wanted to write about, and since the MacBook Air was in front of me, I figured I could just use that. I have a Markdown editor on the Mac, and it’s hooked up to my OneDrive account. But once I got to the image editing part of the equation, I ran into an issue I often have on the Mac. This system doesn’t have some tool like those I use regularly on Windows—in this case, Paint—making it hard to do the simplest of editing tasks. (I need 16:9 images, and often have to add white space to an image with a different aspect ratio. This is really easy to do in Paint.)

Like anyone else on earth, I can Google something like “Mac app that works like Microsoft Paint,” and I came across a free download on the web that looked promising. So I downloaded it. And when I ran the resulting download, I received the following prompt.

Ah, right. By default, macOS is configured to only allow users to install apps from the Mac App Store. You can disable this functionality in System Preferences, macOS’s version of Settings. (Actually, it’s a bit broader than that: macOS also allows installs from “identified developers” from the web; you won’t see this prompt if you try to install Google Chrome on the Mac, for example.)

At first glance, this may seem to be just like the Windows 10 S model. But it’s not: You can’t flip a switch in Windows 10 S to install a desktop application. You literally have to upgrade it to Windows 10 Pro to do so.

There is, in fact, an option in Windows 10 Home and Pro that lets you emulate the default Windows 10 S experience: If you navigate to Settings > Apps & Features, you will see an “Installing apps” header right at the top. It’s set to “Allow apps from anywhere” by default. But if you switch it to “Allow apps from the Store only,” you’ll see something very much like that macOS warning when you try to install a desktop application.

(There’s also a “Warn me before installing apps from outside the Store” option for wafflers.)

The language here is the same as it is in Windows 10 S: In place of Windows Store apps, Microsoft uses the term “verified apps from the Store.” But of course, you can always override it. And unlike with Windows 10 S, you can do so without upgrading the operating system.

I see a new future for Windows Store apps in that term “verified apps.” This will impact Windows 10 S most of all, but that makes sense because Windows 10 S is the future of Windows.

If you accept that UWP has no future and that the only truly successful Windows Store apps will be non-UWP apps, then it follows that Microsoft will keep needing to make concessions about what apps it offers from the Store. And once you get past those developers who are willing to do the work to put their solutions in AppX containers, you get the majority who will not. (Like Google, with Chrome, perhaps.)

So I think it’s time for Microsoft to start “verifying” desktop applications. And they need to let Windows 10 S users, and all Windows 10 users, install those apps that they have verified, from the Store. Chrome should be on that list. Must be.

They can do so with a warning: “This app may not conform to the safety, reliability, and performance guarantees that we make with Windows Store apps,” or whatever. But this nanny state stuff isn’t going to work. And the only future for the Store is to tear down that wall. And to let verified desktop apps in.

Right, I know. Whatever that means. But think about the transition we’re making here, and how this would be a step forward in that transition. Verifying known-good desktop applications is no different than letting developers wrap their solutions with the Desktop Bridge from a user’s perspective: This is something that Microsoft says is probably safe, and it’s in the Store. More to the point, it’s something that users actually want to install and use. That will drive traffic to the Store. And who knows, over time it may even help downloads of true UWP apps since those users will now actually care about the Store.

Regardless of the details—I know some will pick apart the fine points of what I’m suggesting—it’s very clear that Windows Store is going nowhere fast. And that Windows 10 S will never be successful unless it can be a bit more open to trusted—sorry, verified—apps that we all want to use. Transitions aren’t hard stops. But today, Windows 10 S and the Windows Store are still too firmly rooted in a hard stop. Let’s make them more transitional so we can all move forward together.