Box kills their Windows and Windows Phone apps

Cloud storage provider Box has discontinued their Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile apps, with the apps no longer available for download.

The move has actually been pre-announced in November last year but without much publicity.

Writing on their support forum Box says:

As of March 1, 2018, Box will no longer support our Box for Windows Phone, Box for Windows 8, or Box for Windows 10 applications. We are deprecating these three specific Box for Windows applications in order to improve focus on our core mobile and desktop applications.

As of January 1, 2018, we will remove all three Box for Windows applications from the Microsoft store. On March 1, 2018, we will deprecate the applications and they will no longer be available for use – users who have these applications downloaded will no longer be able to access Box through them.

Despite deprecating these three Box for Windows applications, we will continue to maintain general support for Windows 8 and Windows 10 operating systems. Box can still be accessed via desktop, web or any other platform that is supported.

For users with an Android or iOS device, we recommend installing our applications for these platforms immediately to start taking advantage of the enhanced mobile experiences. If a user is on Windows 10, he/she can continue to access Box via Box Sync or the Box Drive Public Beta.  If your device is on an alternate platform, we recommend using our mobile web experience to access Box on the go.

Box has been an early supporter of Windows Phone, launching an app in 2013, and releasing a UWP app in 2015 for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile. As we have been seeing recently, instead of UWP apps being more protected from being discontinued, we have had the demise of Windows Phone actually result in the loss of UWP apps from the Windows 10 Store, as companies promote web-based solutions for the desktop instead.

Given that the apps have been discontinued some weeks ago, I suspect not too many of our readers use Box’s cloud service.

Are any of our readers affected? Let us know below.

Thanks John for the tip.