Enlarge / The Microsoft Store in Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)
When Microsoft introduced Windows 11 over the summer, it also detailed a major shift in strategy for its app store. In an effort to woo more developers and their apps after years of indifference, Microsoft said it would allow all kinds of apps developed and packaged with all kinds of tools into the Microsoft Store, including everything from traditional Win32 apps to Electron apps to progressive web apps (PWAs).
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.
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