> as a developer it’s not a clear win over WinForms
Can you put a WinForms app into the Microsoft Store? UWP apps having a marketplace to sell them is kind of a point in their favour, even if it’s an entirely-artificial restriction Microsoft made up to push UWP.
Is the Windows Store a thing that people actually use? I'm broken by decades of Windows use, going back to 3.1 at this point, so I am completely conditioned to installing software off of disks (it's still a thing, I swear!) or downloading from a website. I also run Windows 10 LTSB on all my machines, so there is no Store available there.
The vast majority of the paid software I have consists of games that come from Steam or Gog. Steam really doesn't work well with UWP games, and the Gog stuff I have is mostly nicely packaged DosBox games from an earlier age.
I’m mostly a Mac user, but when setting up a friend’s Windows 10 PC, I used the Windows Store to download whatever apps I could that were available there, and only installed from the web for apps that didn’t have Windows Store versions.
My thinking is:
1. apps on the Windows Store have some level of sandboxing forced upon them, so I can rest assured that the Windows Store releases of these apps won’t make a mess of their computer, even after major-version updates. (Remember uTorrent?)
2. Windows Store apps get automatically updated in the background without ever running them—like apps installed via the OS package manager on Linux. Give some people any chance to cancel/delay an update, and they’ll do it, indefinitely. Better for most regular users [who aren’t relying on any reflexive professional workflows] to have their apps just “be” the newest version, at all times.
The sandboxing part isn't quite true anymore. You can use Desktop Bridge to package win32 apps for the store. These apps are not sandboxed in the way that UWP apps are though they are still kinda-sorta sandboxed (they can access any file the user can, but the appdata folder and registry edits are sandboxed).
There is also some sort of vaguely-stated plan to allow totally unsandboxed win32 apps in the store at some point in the future but seems to specifically only apply to games.
99% of users don’t have optical drives anymore so installing software from disks isn’t really that much of a thing anymore. You have to provide a usb optical drive with the disk if you want that and then you might as well provide a thumb drive.
Can you put a WinForms app into the Microsoft Store? UWP apps having a marketplace to sell them is kind of a point in their favour, even if it’s an entirely-artificial restriction Microsoft made up to push UWP.