Evernote’s Desktop App Comes to Windows Store

As promised, Evernote has brought its desktop application to the Windows Store, providing users with a safer, more reliable way to have a full-featured Evernote experience on Windows 10.

About a month ago, Evernote revealed that it was dropping its lackluster Evernote Touch mobile app for Windows and would replace it in Windows Store with the full-featured desktop application. It can do this thanks to Microsoft’s Project Centennial technology, which lets developers “wrap” their legacy Win32 desktop applications in a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app container and publish them alongside other UWP apps in the Store.

This approach has its pros and cons, of course. But I think it’s an overwhelmingly positive development: Companies like Evernote don’t want to start over from scratch and re-implement years of functionality in a new app. So Centennial offers them a way to bring forward an existing application and, if desired, even enhance it with unique UWP features like support for live tiles and notifications.

But even if a developer chooses not to take these additional steps—and it appears that Evernote has not, at least not yet—the Windows Store versions of these wrapped apps are still superior to the normal versions you’d download and install from the web. They’re more secure and reliable, for starters, because UWP apps are isolated from the rest of the system. And they’re self-contained, so they can be installed and uninstalled with a single click, and they never strew extraneous files all over your PC, leaving a mess.

Looking at the Evernote app today, what I see is indeed the desktop application experience, from the initial setup experience to the app itself. There’s nothing weird about it at all. Except that when time came to get rid of it, all I had to do was right-click in Start and choose Uninstall.

No fuss, no mess.