Tech

Expanded Windows 11 app store comes to Windows 10 “soon, ” available to testers now

The new Microsoft Store running on Windows 10.

Enlarge / The new Microsoft Store running on Windows 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you don’t want to (or can’t) run Windows 11 on your PC, the good news is that Microsoft will be providing at least a few app updates to Home windows 10 to keep it feeling useful. One of those app updates is Windows 11’s revamped Microsoft Store, which is now available in order to Windows 10 users in the Release Preview Insider channel .

The new Microsoft Store isn’t dramatically different from the old one in its design, though a few of the changes are clear improvements—viewing your app library and grabbing updates for the particular apps you already have installed happens on the same screen now, which is handy. But the real reason to install it is its dramatically improved app selection . Microsoft has loosened typically the rules for the kinds of apps that can be submitted to and downloaded from the store, and apps like Zoom, Discord, the VLC Player, Adobe Reader, the LibreOffice suite, and even the Epic Games Store are all available to download through the store. Once installed, this apps look and work often the same way as the standalone versions.

Not everything in Windows 11’s app store will make it to House windows 10. The store version associated with the Windows Subsystem for Linux isn’t available in Windows 10, nor is the Amazon Appstore or its underlying Windows Subsystem for Android. But for regular users, the expanded selection of actually useful apps can make setting up a new PC the bit easier and may help people avoid paying for scammy third-party app clients that have stepped in to fill the vacuum left by the absence of official apps.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments