Yes, UWP is Still Dead (Premium)

Every year, we’re forced to revisit this topic, so why not just have some fun with it? Is the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) (still) dead?

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

I bring this up now because it was one of the first questions asked of Microsoft at one of the Build 2022 sessions I attended yesterday, Ask the Experts: Building great apps with the open platform of Windows. The session was hosted by Thomas Fennel, who last October publicly admitted that UWP was deprecated, that it would only receive “bug, reliability, and security fixes,” and not new features. Developers who needed the latest features, including the WinUI 3 technologies required for the Windows 11 look and feel, would need to move along to the Windows App SDK, he said at the time.

I assumed that ended the debate. But what the heck. Maybe something has changed.

“We’ve got one of the classics here that we’re going to have to talk about very briefly,” the affable Fennel said. “’Is UWP dead? Will you ever support WinUI 3 in UWP and, if not, will WinUI 2 development continue alongside WinUI 3?’ I’m going to start with the first one. UWP’s not dead. We posted a fairly detailed article on the Win App SDK repo last year that talks about UWP, the investments in the platform, etc. and I highly recommend that you go check that out.”

I do too. It’s referenced above in that October link. But here’s the direct link. It says what I said it says: nothing new is supported in UWP. And I’ll even expand on what that post says: UWP is still supported in the sense that each version of UWP is tied to a specific Windows 10 version; that, of course, is one of the problems with UWP, which is why Microsoft decoupled these capabilities from Windows milestones with the Windows App SDK, which is the future of desktop development.

“The short answer is, no, it’s not dead,” he concludes of UWP. “There [are] a lot of people using it that really like it, and they’ll continue to love it, and use it, and it will continue to be a great app platform. It’s, like, good for the right things that people want to use it for. So please, use it where it makes sense.”

Ah boy. Fennel then passes the question on to Ryan Demopoulos, the lead product manager for the Windows App SDK & WinUI.

“Our platform innovation, really where we’re focusing on the native side of the platform, is in the Windows App SDK,” he said. “And the Windows App SDK targets Win32 [desktop]. So even though UWP isn’t dead, we’re not going to be doing a lot of UWP advancement and investment in that direction. We’re really trying to basically bring all the goodness that the UWP community has had for many years and try to bring that to Win32 developers so they can tap into and leverage that benefit too. So I’ll just add that on there, and make that clear.”

Yes, that is clear. It’s literally the point I’ve been making for years.

(Interestingly, the next questio...