Party’s over! The bigwigs over at Redmond have made the decision to take down a couple of Microsoft Stores. Namely, those for Education and Businesses, the two outlets that recently launched.
The big idea behind these dedicated apps repositories was to enable the possibility of specific applications to be distributed within organizations. That is to say, outside of the main Microsoft Store that is the standard.
If you liked the flexibility this offers, then you might want to stay on Windows 10 and enjoy these stores until they go down in the first quarter of 2023.
And if you’re like the millions that are eager to make the jump to Windows 11 once the new OS is officially launched, then do know that both these stores will not be supported on the upcoming operating system at all.
In a post detailing their retirement, Microsoft explained how it is not actually abandoning the features of these two stores:
“You can still centrally manage apps and deploy them to your Windows 10—and, later this year, Windows 11—endpoints.”
Windows Package Manager will facilitate these operations, and you can use the WinGet command line tool to query your public and private apps repository.
Besides, the standard Microsoft Store is getting a new look and is inviting all manner of applications, from Win32, to .NET, UWP, Xamarin, Electron, Reactive Native, Java, PWAs, and everything else in-between.
These capabilities are set to arrive in preview capacity during the first half of 2022, with a planned standard release in the second half of next year.
