Ask Paul: June 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We have a metric ton of questions this week, and that seems like a fine way to kick off the weekend.
Store apps automatically reinstalling
SherlockHolmes asks:

I have a weird problem with the Microsoft Store and how it behaves after an Update. after an Update, it reinstalls UWP Apps I uninstalled from my machine. And that happens only to the build-in Microsoft Apps. Thats the main reason I blocked the Store on my Win 10 Enterprise machine. Do you have any idea if this is wanted by Microsoft or is it just me? Thanks.

I used to have this problem all the time: You’d uninstall the silly Candy Crush games only to have them reappear later when the Store silently did app updates in the background. But I haven’t had this happen in a long time, and I assume you’re referring to more substantial apps (Mail, Calendar, whatever). But it’s definitely not supposed to work like that. I always assumed this was related to a bug where there was an update pending for an app you deleted and that was the cause of it reappearing.

Given that I’m not sure what’s causing this, you could try disabling automatic app updates in the Store app, I guess (In the app, See more (“…”) > Settings > App updates.) That said, I suspect that upgrading to a new Windows 10 version (like 2004) might cause them to be reinstalled at that point too.
Windows Phone alternate future
sabertooth920 asks:

Do you think things could have been different for Windows Phone had it been first or second to market?

For Microsoft to have out-done Android, it would have needed to make some decisions that the Microsoft of 2007-2008 was incapable of making. At that time, it was still operating on the delusion that its licensing strategy for Windows on the PC could be adapted successfully to mobile when what it really needed to do was just make it available to hardware makers for free. But there’s so much more to it than that. Windows Mobile had kind of stalled regardless because Microsoft allowed hardware partners to ship any kinds of devices they wanted, and the sheer variety of hardware out there fragmented the market, making it impossible to deliver upgrades/updates. And Microsoft’s initial iPhone response was to evolve the surface layers of Windows Mobile for touch without making sweeping changes across the platform, most of which was still optimized for tiny styluses. They lost years because of this.

To understand what Microsoft should have done, it’s helpful to read up on what Google did do. Google was just about to release Android at that time, and the version they initially created looked a lot like Windows Mobile and ran on devices that, at that time, would have been familiar to anyone with a Treo, Blackjack, Blackberry, or similar phone, where the front was half screen and half hardware keyboard. But seeing the iPhone launch, Google stopped that from happening and created a fully multi-touch based system instead, something that l...