Now we’re seeing some of the fruits of that change—Microsoft has announced that major third-party apps like Zoom, Discord, Adobe Reader, the VLC media player, and even the LibreOffice suite are all now available in the Microsoft Store for people using the Windows 11 Insider Preview builds. Web apps like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Tumblr are also available. These PWAs look and work just like the regular websites but can easily be pinned to Start or the Taskbar and can display notification badges and a few other benefits that make them feel a bit more like desktop apps.
Microsoft also says it will allow other app stores into the Microsoft Store, starting with Amazon and the Epic Games Store. These will be available “over the next few months.” (When support for Amazon’s Android apps are added to Windows 11 sometime after the official launch, those apps will still be searchable from within the Microsoft Store itself.) If you don’t want to (or can’t) install Windows 11 on your PC, Microsoft says that the new Microsoft Store and the new apps in it will also be coming to Windows 10 “in the coming months.” Windows 11’s rollout officially begins on October 5.
Credit where credit is due – these are good moves, and shows that at least at this point in time, Microsoft is not interested in using the Microsoft Store as a stick. As long as their store policies remain like this, and they don’t lock down sideloading, they’re on the right side of this divide.
Let’s just hope it’s not a trap.
If microsoft resort to a stick strait away, most developers will reject it outright. It would be windows 8 app store all over again, which was not competitive AND lacked critical mass. Microsoft does not want a repeat of that, They first need to build critical mass before turning the screws on developers. If they can get most of the windows software market by aggressively pursuing market share instead of profits, both users and developer will start using it and taking it for granted. If microsoft intends to use a stick, that would be the time to do it and not before. Because once microsoft controls the users, then it has strong leverage to use against developers to charge outrageous fees like the other app stores “Oh, you don’t like our fees and want to leave? Ha, you’d loose most of your customers and revenue who’ve migrated to our store. Like it or not you need us to reach them”.
They wouldn’t be so on-the-nose of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this were their long term plan.
Alfman,
The software world seems to go in cycles. We have some good years, and then too much fragmentation.
I remember downloading cracked version of the games I purchased due to terrible copy protection implementations. Steam fixed all those. I think this was around 2008-2010.
Then every publisher started their own store with their own frontend. If I recall correctly it started with EA, and everybody caught on. Now, I might have 7-8 “store” applications on my Windows machine.
So it is probably time for another fix.
However I agree that given their track record, Microsoft might not be the best choice. Yet, it might be the only choice. (I don’t see Epic store being integrated with Steam for example).
Professional developers should be boycotting Microsoft for its abuse of the Windows monopoly. The fascists have got weaponised psychology and boiling frogs down to a fine art. They will all be sorry.
Anyone who doesn’t have a fundamentally portable codebase and isn’t able to release on multiple platforms simulataneously is either an idiot or in on the scam.
I find it rather amusing. This to me reads as ‘we know the windows app store is a failure. Amazon knows it is near impossible to compete with Google for Android apps… so let’s basically merge the two!
I certainly hope the aforementioned apps like zoom and Discord do not require to be installed via the app store and keep the standalone download available. I don’t want to link any emails to an MS operating system!
Everyone’s talking about normal stuff and then there’s Holly sitting in the corner mumbling about the fascists she sees everywhere. Poor lady
I think she’s got some deep rooted issues somewhere. There’s wearing the tinfoil hat, and then there’s Terry Davis levels of insanity.
I think HollyB is somewhere in the middle.
Yeah, it’s really quite boring. I wish OSAlert had a block function.
She’s not completely off base. Tying your company to one mechanism of release has its risks. There are countless stories of this happening to indie developers on the Apple App Store as well as the google play store. Something happens one day, and poof there goes you’re sales.
Having said that it doesn’t make you an idiot for not having code portable enough to be released on multiple platforms, that’s just a risk you have to weigh. Maybe you’ll never be banned and all that wasted bloat is for nothing. That’s time and effort you could have spent on user facing features to improve market share. I wouldn’t propose to tell any company or dev which is the right choice 100% of the time.
@BIll Shooter.
Portability is a one time up front investment. To reconstuct my portability layer which could deal with multiple platforms going back to Watcom C and 95/NT4 and various consoles plus Linux would take a few days of hard work or couple of weeks for someone who knows what they are doing. This thinnest of layers is really a general purpose layer which can easily be a #include for every common framework. The next layer up is harder work as you’re getting into frameworks. My library was based on Borland VCL design and a few other things but isone of those write once things like any Windows framework or SDL.
Abstract early and abstract often is the name of the game. It’s really just a question of having a well designed code interface so you insulate the rest of your code from vendor specific features. People should do this as a minimum and it’s pretty trivial.
You may not use a portability layer but as long as you abstract well you’re in a much better position to pivot your code from one OS to another, or compiler, or vendor API iteration. For graphocs programmers it might be as simple as having a #include with primates such as DrawBox(X1,Y1,X2,Y2) or whatever instead of calling a vendor specific function directly. The same principle can be easily extended to other functions such as file handling or garbage collection routines or something more funky.
If you’re being ambitious think a little more about forward design while you create abstractions. You can get codeworking fast and backfill function stubs later. The advantage of thinking through at this stage means that your abstraction will be cleaner than if you added functionality later and only thought through it then so easier and less maintenance in the long term. Also if you’re into systems architecture design you may find forward compatibility is pretty much locked in for later versions. Sun had this down to a fine art with Solaris.
Another advantage with portable code is testing against different compilers and API’s and platforms can help shake bugs out.
Because of the work I did with games and GUI framworks and portability and store mechanisms among other things I’m of the view that stores should really use an open architecture. I keep using the OpenGL ARB as an example and that’s because it’s a very good starting point. Discussing the stack from install mechanisms to distribution to customised vendor stores is a bit of a topic as is things like play a game while you install/upgrade (it helps if design everything from the ground up to support a system like this), or distributed code execution etcetera for performance or intellectual property protection reasons are things too and not completely unrelated. These are old ideas to me but have since been implimented to one degree or another. Adobe and various games spring to mind and even then the basic principles were around and implimented before I was working in this space.
The current discussion between IC fabrication plant owners and car manufacturers is interesting for similar reasons. The thing is you have the quick and dirty get it to market side versus industrial requirements. If you think in terms of supporting a product between 20 years and forever and which may be used for serious reasons you develop a different approach.
I have no idea what is wrong with people. Maybe it’s an age thing but even Slashdot is uncritical about the new Microsoft Office. More pointless changes to flog the next version of Windows, embracing vendor lock-in feature creep just like every other Microsoft framework here we go.
HollyB,
Yes it could be the age.
Back in the day, I was coding in GW-BASIC, and was in awe of Bill Gates. For me he was the pinnacle of software achievement.
In high school, I “found my way” in Linux, and was actively advocating moving people off Windows.
In college, I actually moved some of our labs into Linux.
To keep things short, I now see Microsoft as any other large entity. It is a coalition of separate forces. Yet, the internal groups have differing agendas, some really supporting open source, while others want to lock everyone in. And, Microsoft is but one of the large fiefdoms of the software world today. They are big, but not omnipresent.
Anyway, people change, companies change, no need to dwell on it too much.
I had other inspirations without having to look to the US. The UK was pretty much the place it was happening for me. It was moment when the government decided to push computing and it shows up today in the statistics for IT literacy.
I do agree about Microsoft being a large entity. I feel the people who have made it post-Gates/Balmer are those good at polishing their image and climbing corporate ladders. This is an entirely different set of skillsets and it shows. It’s similar with national governance. As the right have eroded institutions and decried expertise while stuffing them with their placemen the big push of Dicken’s era or the post-WWII settlement has eroded. We’re coasting on empty.
The other day I read of the US big push to get Europe to sign up to withholding technology from China. While I agree China has issues this is a typical US con to capitalise on Europe’s technical know-how. I get the impression a few European politicians have already told the US to sling it.