Reunited and it Feels So Good (Premium)

After years of silence and misinformation, Microsoft finally made it official: It is “unifying access” to Win32 and UWP APIs and decoupling each from specific Windows versions.

The UWP era is over.

To be fair, Microsoft has been working towards this goal for years, first by broadening the types of apps that developers could provide through the Microsoft Store and later by finally decoupling UWP user interface APIs from specific Windows 10 versions and making them more broadly available to the developers that never adopted UWP. But even while doing so, the bigger problem is that the firm has been silent or even dishonest about its plans, sowing confusion.

Today, however, Microsoft finally offering some clarity and admitting to what it communicated privately to journalists last year: UWP is not the way forward, and neither is the Microsoft Store. Instead, APIs that used to be tied to UWP will be decoupled from that framework and from specific Windows 10 versions and made available to the majority of developers who never could, or never wanted to, use UWP.

This decoupling is starting with what used to be the UWP UI/UX stack and is now called WinUI. In fact, that’s one of the more interesting side-notes to this story: Aside from the name of this effort, which Microsoft calls Project Reunion, there isn’t really a lot of new news here. We’ve known about these changes since Build 2019. It’s just that so many people, inexplicably, have refused to believe it was happening. I hope it’s clear now.

And with that clarity in mind, let me reiterate the primary benefits of this change.

UWP, as I’m sure many understand, is deeply flawed. It was created as a way for Microsoft-focused developers to write apps that would run across multiple platforms, which explains the “universal” part of its name. But UWP was never truly universal: Those apps targeted only Microsoft platforms, which once included Windows 8.x/10, Windows Phone/Mobile, Xbox One, Surface Hub, HoloLens, and Windows 10 IoT.

The devices that run on these platforms are incredibly different from each other in many cases, and the UWP platform itself was compromised by this fact. It is a mobile platform, so it shares the battery- and memory-saving features we see on platforms like Android and iOS, and as originally designed was inadequate for creating powerful desktop productivity apps. This problem because exacerbated when Windows Phone failed; suddenly, Microsoft had a mobile software platform but no true mobile hardware platform on which to run those apps.

That UWP apps were unsophisticated is an understatement. They had to be written to support a least-common-denominator, which was Phone for apps with user interfaces. And while those apps might have looked fine on handsets, they looked childish and unprofessional on the desktop.

So while Microsoft’s original UWP version---“One Windows”---never made sense, in my opinion, I think most people woul...