Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps
bgr.comIf Microsoft won’t eat their own dogfood, why should they expect anyone else to?
This is why no one jumps onboard with new stuff Microsoft wants to push. They don’t stick to anything. A dev can constantly chase after Microsoft’s latest pet projects, or they can simply ignore all of it, knowing it will eventually fall out of fashion and save themselves (and their users) a lot of trouble.
Office was already slowly adopting UWP, some of the new WinUI 2.0 components came from them, in a spirit similar to how Ribbon went from Office into Windows.
Then came Project Reunion, with the whole reboot, that five years later still hasn't reached feature parity, seems most of the team is gone, and they are even open sourcing it, with hopes that the community fixes the bugs that a $4 trillion valued company doesn't care about.
Of course only people on the Windows team care about this, because their salaries depend on it.
the installation story for devs writing windows apps has been dreadful for 3 decades.
vs used to help you build setup.exe, which was always a huge chore to use.
clickonce was launched to replace all this with hosted manifests and auto-updates and modern features like that, and immediately forgotten about because it was so broken. nobody ever used it.
then they brought out WinUI and the windows store, which was so overly sandboxed that it didn't fit most use cases and the permissions system of the store never seemed to line up with the APIs themselves.
then they tried their best to destroy myget by launching winget, which got forgotten about again. now even MS doesnt use their own store.
Anecdotally, yesterday I launched the Windows sandbox to investigate some files and noticed that notepad.exe was not available. A quick research revealed that this is because notepad.exe was replaced by the modern variant with Colipot and shit, which is an AppX package (Windows Store file format). And since the store was ripped out of the sandbox, there's no Notepad in it.
I'm not sure I would say Microsoft forgot about the store. I think Microsoft is like a Dog that has no head, no legs, only tails. And these tails have their own will and don't care about the dog in the slightest.
rumour has it the next version of windows will be called Microsoft 365 Azure for Desktop XBOX Edition so that each of the executives in the money making sections gets their piece.
You forgot to shoehorn Copilot in there. They renamed Office to something like that, not even kidding.
yeah i just heard, i'm changing my prediction to Microsoft 365 Copilot Xbox Edition
When I was developing C# winforms applications 15 years ago, I just created a fat signed .exe that was then distributed. Installers and click once stuff was a big turn off for users.
On startup, if not already there, it automagically copied itself to the installation directory, created an autostart directory link and started it from the new location and got killed with a named pipe command. It contained and extracted another .exe that was continuously checking for new versions, downloading them and starting them.
As malwary as it gets but it worked flawlessly!
The windows store nightmare that came after looks dreadful.
I would have hated that, it looks like one thing (a standalone exe) but it is doing something else (installer like).
Non technical users don‘t understand any of this.
Which is even more of a problem.
Love it, jank like that might explain why windows is so busy on startup...
Not to mention the need for a code signing certificate, which even in 2026 is a gigantic and expensive hassle to obtain.
You can spend weeks of effort and hundreds of dollars just to ship an installable hello world app these days. The MS store takes care of signing, but there are other trade-offs.
The entire desktop TTHW (time to installable hello world) story is horrible across the board:
- Win: Decent tech foundation for updates made insufferable by code signing requirements.
- Mac: No update story, cobble together a bunch of tools/scripts, notarize releases with Apple (not very onerous), hope you don't ship an update that crashes at launch because you broke your updater too.
- Linux: No consensus on how to package. Bob wants a .deb, Alice wants a snap. Flatpak seems to be winning overall. The best tool to smooth over Win/Mac installer headaches (Conveyor) doesn't support flatpak. Bummer.
> No consensus on how to package. Bob wants a .deb,
Bob wants a deb. I give him a deb. Bob is not happy because I compiled the software with an incompatible glibc. I deploy a webapp for Bob. Alice gets to use it too.
And then there's Gentoo just smuggly accepting fate and always rebuilding everything rather than trying to force compatibility with libraries.
Honestly it really has been nice down here in Gentoo, now they have bin packages it even use it on laptops.
I even use flatpaks for the stuff I don't want to build, everything just works most of the time.
there are only two versions of libc mine and the one you brought with you.
This kinda sounds like hell for low memory machines. RIP shared memory optimizations.
Bob wants a deb. I tell him to pound sand and give him a statically linked executable and pray that DNS works. If the software is still relevant in five years, some Debian maintainer will take an ancient version, convert it to use shared libraries, apply a dozen patches and give a .deb to Bob.
Everything my W11 VM has was installed with winget.
clickonce for a brief shining moment was the closest we ever got to being able to deploy an application like a webpage.
I did run into a lot of issues with the store/winrt APIs where there were backdoors that the NTDev team used to work around all the limitations, but they would never publish them.
> vs used to help you build setup.exe, which was always a huge chore to use.
Was it... REALLY though? Everyone knew how to use the setup wizards.
i think it's telling that Nullsoft created their own installer for WinAmp and its still 20 years later one of the most sane and popular ways of distributing apps.
I'm still using it to distribute/update production apps and whilst the script language is a bit funky, it works reliably. And the tools work under Linux too, so I can easily integrate a "create setup" step in the CI/CD environment.
Using the setup wizards isn't the hard part... It's creating them.
Tools like Inno Setup make the easy parts very easy and the hard parts doable.
The problem wasn't using them, it was creating one for your software.
Next, next, next, next Except choosing installation path.
I'm glad that after windows 10, you can finally install most software as NOT ADMIN via disabling(!) UAC completely :)
It's telling that even Microsoft itself doesn't believe in the Microsoft Store.
MS invented MSI installers, Office didn't use them, they don't seem to believe in anything
Microsoft doesn't train its AI on its own source code, put its own software in its store, use its own frameworks for its software and so on. It even designs its UI on Macs.
It's also the default method used by Intune in the backend to deploy it on Windows systems.
At least they give the ability to be really specific about what you want to deploy using the Configuration XML file.
I wish they offered something similar on macOS.
You can get individual app installers at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-histo... and more at https://mofa.cocolabs.dev/standalone_apps/standalone_current...
That's what I ended up using, in order to avoid repackaging the installer I built a payloadless deployment (dummy/empty .pkg, unsigned as it doesn't matter if it fails to run, followed by a post-install script that downloads the latest installer for each software to deploy, install them, then delete the temporary folder.
No idea why have they created these MS Store versions. The same for MS Store Edge browser - it was (or is) just a downloader of an exe file from their webservers - useless piece of an app
I’ve read the article and still don’t know why.
> It's simply easier for the Microsoft development team to maintain one version of the suite and they've chosen the most convenient option — Click-to-Run (vs Microsoft Store)
Must be significantly harder to develop MS Store apps. Due to sandboxing limitations?
I suffered through this Store pain recently, after buying a $$ game from Microsoft: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/cant-install-forza-horizon-on... (11 things to try!)
Microsoft also had a separate EXE to download to try to repair things, along with wsreset, wscollect, etc. Far too complicated.
Microsoft publish two different editions of the Windows Minecraft launcher with different sets of features. One is the MS Store version and one is the regular version
> It's simply easier for the Microsoft development team to maintain one version of the suite
Microsoft, the king of backward compatibility?
Tell me it is not true.
Because it’s easier for the few devs of one of the richest company of the world to manage only one delivery method.
But now with AI help they should be twice as productive and have all time in the world for extra work, right?
/s
Probably because there's internal conflicts between the store team and the applications group, that neither of them want to deal with anymore, this might have been for the windows S support (remember store only windows).
They have their own distribution system, so they don't need this anymore.
Content marketing and modern “journalism” at it’s finest
BGR used to be a decent blog when they were covering Blackberries... but once your main jam dies off all you can do is turn to longform slop a decade later.
Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS? The process should be as simple as visiting app’s website, optionally paying, and installing. No middle man, hence less point of breakage.
Well, the rest of the world (outside of MacOS and Windows) settled on repositories and package managers, with hash verification, versioning, updating/installing/uninstalling with composable commands (that can also be used via GUIs), etc.
Use Fedora for half a year and tell me what you prefer.
Those are only tolerable because: They are free, optional, operated by people who have no incentive to be the slightest bit anti-user, and you are never actually limited to them so you can take the convenience because you still get the options and control when you do need it.
Produce the `./configure && make install` for Office and you would have a point.
MacOS and Windows, as far as I understand, do the equivalent of "build for the target OS/arch and include DLLs for all transitive dependencies except the system ones." MacOS puts all that in a disk image while Windows I don't know puts it in one or several directories.
I like the "one consistent system with one dependency tree" policy of Debian et al, but with flatpack, appimage, snap, etc. the "application" part of software might prefer the Windows/MacOS model.
I use package manager too regardless of OS, but after all Microsoft Store isn’t for tech-savvy people, right?
There are UI frontends for package managers, like KDE Discover
And yet none of those "outsiders" have figured out a way to economically renumerate developers for their work. Flathub had a initiative a few years ago to add payments to help developers fund their projects, but I haven't seen anything come out of it.
Most linux distros require that software they distribute is open source, and link to the home pages of applications, so effectively donations are the only way to pay for those. There are paid distros (which are almost always about support, there was a paid GNUStep distro though many years ago).
On the other hand, Steam et al are app stores where developers can get paid.
Open source doesn't mean free.
> On the other hand, Steam et al are app stores where developers can get paid.
Yes, this is exactly my point. App stores have a reason to exist. They provide discoverability and a streamlined way to monetise your app, something that is sorely lacking in open source projects. A case in point for example is Krita, which is published as a paid app on the Microsoft Store. The revenue generated by the sales goes to fund the development of the project. Linux needs an equivalent.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I can download Blender from almost any package manager, and the devs of Blender are paid.
This works for Blender because they're a big fish and receive money from big corporations. The vast majority of good open source projects are underfunded or unpaid. Linux distros need a way to streamline payments to open source apps. As I mentioned above, Flathub [0] had an initiative in this direction, but not sure what happened to that.
>Use Fedora for half a year and tell me what you prefer.
I prefer good high-dpi support, Wifi and Bluetooth that works, usability, developers getting rewarded for their hard work, etc.
I'm legitimately not sure what you're saying. Are you saying Linux, Windows, or MacOS? Because as far as Bt and Wifi go, usability, rewarding developers, that applies to Linux and MacOS and ... not Windows whatsoever. I'm not sure about High DPI support, probably sucks on X11, maybe on Wayland, so I'm guessing you mean Windows?
FYI I develop software for Linux in my free time, I don't get paid and I feel pretty rewarded.
>I'm legitimately not sure what you're saying.
I'm saying Linux is a mediocre desktop operating system, especially on laptops.
> probably sucks on X11
Xrandr works just fine and has been for decades.
Steam exists, and provides features desired by both users and developers.
I'm not sure getting software directly from developers is less likely to break than getting it through a store. The store may do QA to ensure that broken apps cannot be uploaded, developers may vanish and hence absent someone else being able to maintain it the app will eventually break, and how are security issues handled?
If Steam decides to suspend your account, you have 0 game in your hand.
But I agree, sometimes central place to get your software might be more reliable.
When buying software I mostly trust Apple over a random software developer.
>No middle man
There usually is, very few software companies handle card transactions themselves. They usually farm it out to someone like Digital River (who aren't very trustworthy).
I always thought Microsoft had seen how much money Google and Apple were making with their app stores and decided they wanted some of that pie...
Who needs it? Microsoft. They want to have something like iOS App Store and Android Play Store, there's a lot of money there
> Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS?
I like the idea. A single place to search for common apps, that also keep them updated. I don't want to download the .exe again and again with ever update. Just do that in the background please.
Though I mostly use WinGet, but it's sadly not as user friendly as apt.
I always assumed the Microsoft Store was just windows' attempt at grabbing some of the app store money that apple and Google are making...
I assumed it was a combination of a relic of the plans to have unified Phone/Desktop back in Win8 days and part of a goal of eventually locking things down as much as Apple has.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more random apps on Windows than macOS, so that was never going to be a good sell...
Will this affect winget?