Microsoft Store Closing Door to Windows 8/8.1 (and Windows Phone) -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Store Closing Door to Windows 8/8.1 (and Windows Phone)

By David Ramel
08/20/2018

Microsoft Store on Oct. 31 will stop accepting new app submissions for Windows Phone 8.x or earlier, along with XAP or APPX packages for Windows 8/8.1.

Windows Phone has long ceased to be a going concern for the company, with an exec last year effectively tweeting about its death after its market share basically shrunk to nothing.

Windows 8.1, however was still garnering 7.56 market share in the Windows-only July 2018 report from StatCounter, which pegged the older Windows 8's share at 2.54 percent.

After ceasing to accept new apps for Microsoft Store on Oct. 31, the company will stop distributing app updates to Windows Phone 8.x or earlier devices on July 1, 2019.

The final milestone in the sunsetting of Windows 8 (introduced in August 2012) and Windows 8.1 (introduced in August 2013), will be July 1, 2023, when Microsoft will stop distributing app updates to Windows 8/8.1 devices.

"We encourage you to explore how you can port your existing app to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) where you can create a single Windows 10 app package that your customers can install onto all device families," Microsoft said in a post today (Aug. 20). "You can learn more about UWP apps here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Get Started Using .NET Aspire with SQL Server & Azure SQL Database

Microsoft experts are making the rounds educating developers about the company's new, opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed, cloud-native applications with .NET.
Microsoft Revamps Fledgling AutoGen Framework for Agentic AI

Only at v0.4, Microsoft's AutoGen framework for agentic AI -- the hottest new trend in AI development -- has already undergone a complete revamp, going to an asynchronous, event-driven architecture.
IDE Irony: Coding Errors Cause 'Critical' Vulnerability in Visual Studio

In a larger-than-normal Patch Tuesday, Microsoft warned of a "critical" vulnerability in Visual Studio that should be fixed immediately if automatic patching isn't enabled, ironically caused by coding errors.
Building Blazor Applications

A trio of Blazor experts will conduct a full-day workshop for devs to learn everything about the tech a a March developer conference in Las Vegas keynoted by Microsoft execs and featuring many Microsoft devs.
Gradient Boosting Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the gradient boosting regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to existing library implementations of gradient boosting regression, a from-scratch implementation allows much easier customization and integration with other .NET systems.