No new apps for Windows 8
Microsoft has announced that it will not release new apps for Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8.x from November 2018. Submissions from developers will also no longer be accepted.
Microsoft is slowly but surely saying goodbye to Windows 8.x, a rather unpopular child of the Windows family. In a blog post, the company announced that app support for Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8.x will be discontinued from November.
Specifically, Microsoft does not plan to accept any more submissions for new apps from external developers as of October 31, 2018. However, the latter still have the option of publishing updates for existing applications.
The Beginning of the end?
Starting July 1, 2019, Microsoft will not ship any further app updates for Windows Phone 8.x or below. App updates will then only be made accessible to users of Windows 10 devices. Finally, Microsoft will also stop distributing app updates for Windows 8.1 from July 1, 2023, which will then only be available for Windows 10 users.
With this announcement, Microsoft is taking a further step away from Windows 8 and towards Windows 10, and as the official update times show, since January 9, 2018 there have only been updates for Windows 8 for critical vulnerabilities as part of extended support.
The deadline for this extended support ends on January 10, 2023 in the case of Windows 8; users of Windows 7 will be confronted with this earlier: With this operating system, extended support will only run until January 14, 2020.