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Home » Windows Tips & Tricks » What's a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Apps?

What's a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Apps?

By MATTHEW TRUONG

Back to 2015, American tech giant Microsoft officially announced the launch of its new platform called Universal Windows Platform (UWP), designed to let developers build once and scale across many different device types and versions of Windows 10. UWP apps was an attempt to replace Win32 apps when it comes to Microsoft’s future ambition for Windows.

 

There are some advantages of UWP apps compare to other versions.

1.Strict authority management

UWP apps declare in their manifest the device capabilities they need such as access to the microphone, location, Webcam, USB devices, files, and so on. The user must acknowledge and authorize that access before the app is granted the capability.

2.Highly adaptive UI

UWP apps are able to use device specific capabilities and adapt the UI to different device screen sizes, resolutions and DPI. And the live tiles make its interface sleeker.

3.Easy to install and uninstall

UWP apps are able to be installed and uninstalled without risk to machine or incurring “machine rot”.

 

But it’s true right now, not many developers are building native UWP apps on Windows 10. So what are the disadvantages of UWP app?

1.Unable to run in in the background

UWP apps can’t run in the background and needs to be resident all the time which torment part of users.

2.Unstable function

In addition, it could crash unexpectedly and its lack of several features which could seriously affects the user experience.

Let’s take the iTunes as an example: iTunes UWP works good with a clean interface and easily sync your device with your account and upload songs right away. But some users complained about something not working, or running slowly.

iTunes UWP

The old iTunes provides all the basic functions and have a classic design, but you always have wrong with transferring existing music from one iPhone to another iPhone.

iTunes desktop

Let's move on to another example. VLC media player is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player. This program of UWP version is more visually pleasing, better integration with the widows OS. But it does not have all the features of the desktop version. Such as you won't be able to tweak audio files, and there isn't even a settings window.

VLC media player UWP

The desktop version is a stable, flexible and lightweight audio and video player. It's an extremely useful tool to have around for music and video.

VLC media player Desktop

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