Microsoft advances the death of Windows 8 by 4 years

On August 20, 2018, Microsoft made a blog post designed to help developers “effectively plan your development cycles.”

The blog post was aimed at telling developers when the Microsoft Store would stop accepting and distributing apps to Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices and in short, said Microsoft would stop accepting new app submissions for Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and WP8.x on the 31st October 2018.

Then on July 1st, 2019, Microsoft would stop distributing app updates to Windows Phone 8.x or earlier devices and on July 1st, 2023 Microsoft was planning to stop distributing app updates to Windows 8/8.1 devices.

Microsoft however quietly updated the blog post on the 2nd April 2019 with a major change for Windows 8 (not the slightly more popular Windows 8.1).

That operating system would now stop receiving app updates on the 1st July 2019, instead of the earlier 1st July 2023.

Windows 8 went out of support on the 12th January 2016, but is according to Netmarketshare is still used by 0.95% of desktop PC users, so around 15 million PCs. If this includes solutions where developers were expecting to deliver updates via the Store, it would seem Microsoft’s earlier blog post has not in fact helped them “effectively plan your development cycles.”

What do our readers think of this change? Let us know below.

Via Nawzil, thanks Rohit for the tip.