Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

Because it’s easier for the few devs of one of the richest company of the world to manage only one delivery method.

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

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.

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?

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 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...