Is improvement better than innovation? A review of 3 most important Windows 10 universal apps.

Satya Nadella’s long term plan is to use the market share of Windows OS to attract developers to write universal apps that will work across all Microsoft platforms like Windows Phone, Xbox and HoloLens; thus bridging the app gap that Microsoft’s eco-system faces today.

Therefore, moving in line with the strategy, all the major apps that were a part of Windows 8 have been updated with universal framework. These include: Store, Mail, Weather, Calendar, OneNote, Photos, People, News, Money and the all new Movies & TV, Groove Music, Xbox and Microsoft Solitaire Collection. However after 3 weeks of living with Windows 10 we found the following three apps to be most significant.

Store

The revamped Store application is a clear indication of the fact that Microsoft now has ‘more than enough’ applications for its Windows platform. Even though you can still sort down applications using either genre, price or popularity, however, to improve user experience the Store now divides applications into 4 major categories- Apps, Games, Music and Movies & TV- by default.  Therefore with the integration of Music, Movies and TV, the Store now works more like Apple’s iTunes platform where you can easily browse the music, movies and TV library using either genre categorization or different ranking orders.

I was a big fan of the layout of the first ever Store app that came with Windows 8, the updated app-design for Windows 8.1 was full of bugs and crashed regularly. Therefore with the new universal framework Microsoft has resolved all such crash issues by making the applications more memory efficient and responsive. The implementation of Microsoft Design Language 2, universal framework and better layout the new Store App is more useful if not anything else.

Mail and OneNote

If there is an app that made Windows 8 somewhat less horrible and more useful for desktop users it was most probably Mail. The official email client from Microsoft used the goods of the metro design to its full extent, live tile notifications being the most significant. It crashed rarely and never faced any kind of disconnection issues, not even once. To even further improve its best application Microsoft enriched it with the best features from its acquisition of Acompli. Deleting, archiving and replying has been made swifter with swipe gestures for touch friendly devices and readability has been made better by using hamburger menus and thus creating more space for the reading pane. 

I will never become a regular user of OneNote as long as the good old Text Document exists but for Windows Phone and Surface users OneNote has always served a purpose. The new universal upgrade comes with an entirely different user interface that finds its roots in the UI of Microsoft’s Office Apps for Windows and Mac. If there is one thing that every note app fails at it is a smooth connection with cloud storage and because developers in Redmond have one of the best cloud technology at hand, thanks to Satya Nadella, OneNote’s best feature has to be auto saving on OneDrive. Other than the facelift with Microsoft Design Language 2 I could not find any substantial changes to the features of an already well-tuned responsive app.

 

Groove Music

The decision to rebrand Xbox Music to Groove Music did not surprise me as much as the fact that Microsoft did not add a single new feature to its one of the best applications. I have always been a big fan of Xbox Music. Unlike its video counterpart that ended up to be a waste of thousands of lines of code, Xbox music had everything that a good everyday music player should have. It was quick to launch, never crashed or lagged, well organized my library, had great cloud integration and now you can even import iTunes playlists. However it was never a visual masterpiece and the unfortunately still isn’t. Yes, there is a new logo, color scheme and super thin icons (from Segoe UI symbol, I guess) but that is it.

Groove Music has all the necessary features to help you get through the day but it is nowhere near the true musical experience that it should have been after 3 years of Windows 8.  At the least I had high hopes that Microsoft will at least add an inbuilt equalizer. But Alas!