Menu
What's the difference between Windows Store apps (introduced in Windows 8) and Universal Windows Platform apps (introduced in Windows 10).
How much do they share from development point of view. If I spent time learning how to build Windows Store apps can this knowledge be transferred to UWP development?
611
All apps ARE NOT necessarily UWP apps. Windows 8.1 apps do run on Windows 10, just not the other way around. Not every company or indie developer has updated their apps to support UWP. All apps that were previously in the store for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 will still run and be available respectively.
UWP is a part of Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 11. UWP apps do not run on earlier Windows versions. Apps that are capable of implementing this platform are natively developed using Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2017, Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio 2022.
Microsoft has announced that the OneNote UWP app will no longer show up in the Microsoft Store, though it will continue to work for now.
We will replace UWP with WinUI components in our v22. 1 release. UWP controls and demos will be removed from all distributions/installations. We will continue to provide support and minor updates to our UWP controls until December 2022.
The Universal Windows Platform uses the same basis of technology that was developed for the Windows 8 Store apps. This includes AppX packaging with manifests, the App Container security context, CoreWindow presentation model, same appmodels (XAML, XAML+DirectX, DirectX), etc.
The difference is that UWP apps can run "as is" on a Windows 10 PC, the Xbox One, and Windows 10 Mobile.
The main differences in the development model are that UWP supports more APIs. There are some APIs that have changed particularly from Windows phone 8.x, but if you have written a Windows 8 Store app moving it to Windows 10 is mostly a recompile. You use the VS 2015 toolset rather than the VS 2012 or VS 2013 toolset.
Unless you have some compelling need to support Windows 8 Store, I'd suggest just going with UWP. There's less code churn for existing codebases as a number of Win32 APIs that were not supported for Windows 8 Store apps are supported for UWP.
See Dual-use Coding Techniques for Games
108
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
