Microsoft is Forming New Team Tasked With Building “100% Native” Windows Apps

Microsoft is forming a new team dedicated to building native, high-quality Windows apps. It’s led by Rudy Huyn, a Principal Lead Architect who previously worked on the Microsoft Store and File Explorer. You may also remember Huyn from his years developing popular third-party apps for Microsoft’s now-deprecated Windows Phone platform.

“I’m building a new team to work on Windows apps,” Huyn posted on X on Friday (via Techspot). “You don’t need prior experience with the platform, what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer.” In reply to his original post, Huyn also confirmed that his team would be building “100% native” apps.

No, 100% native

— Rudy Huyn (@RudyHuyn) March 27, 2026

Despite Windows’ massive market share, you’ll be more likely to find better-designed apps on macOS, and I’d argue it’s also true for Microsoft’s own apps. The Outlook app for Mac is native and miles better than both the “classic” Outlook app for Windows and the new web-based client, which has performance issues and will show you ads unless you have a premium subscription. Two years ago, the privacy-focused company Proton described the new Outlook for Windows as “a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s 772 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself.”

The situation isn’t better if you look at apps like Microsoft Teams, which abandoned the Electron framework for the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime. Copilot for Windows is another good example of an app that was redesigned at least 3 times in recent years, but it’s still a WebView 2 app underneath with underwhelming performance.

The Microsoft Store itself is filled with basic web apps that just bring pretty much no value compared to visiting their websites. It’s almost like Microsoft is signaling third-party developers that Windows users don’t care about well-crafted native apps, so they shouldn’t bother building them.

The late Steve Jobs once claimed that “Microsoft has no taste” and compared using iTunes for Windows to “giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell.” Well, I doubt anyone misses the bloated iTunes for Windows, but there’s probably a good reason why new AI apps like ChatGPT and Codex shipped first on Mac.

The creation of a new team working on native Windows apps follows the recent announcement of a detailed strategy to improve the OS’ performance and reliability throughout the year. Microsoft will bring back the ability to move the taskbar to the top or the sides of the screen, and the company also promised to reduce resource usage, improve driver reliability, and core apps and experiences like File Explorer, Windows Search, and the Start Menu.

Do you trust Microsoft to fix Windows 11’s biggest issues? Sound off in the comments below.