It's hard to describe how uselessly restrictive the UWP model was when they originally introduced it as "Metro-style apps" in Windows 8. Among the things it officially did not support included:

- Multiple monitors - Non-full screen views - Sideloading outside of the Store - Offline installation - Explicit threads - thread pool only - Aligned memory allocation - malloc only - Any C++ compiler other than MSVC - Support for any version of Windows other than Windows 8 - Running apps as administrator - Running more than one instance of an app at a time - Runtime shader compilation

If any ONE of these things was a blocker, you could not write a Metro style app. And yet Microsoft pushed this extremely hard -- including almost completely ending any maintenance of Win32 APIs. And despite the many relaxations and extensions, UWP is still largely useless today, and now even itself seems to be going into maintenance mode. All of which has done a lot of damage to the state of Windows desktop platform development.

As an example of how bizarre UWP is, for some reason every time they published a list of new APIs added to it, they converted the list of API identifiers to lowercase in the documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/whats-new/wind...

It's relatively insignificant, but... why? Just one of many things that showed how immature UWP was.

> They tried to make Windows into a mobile OS, severely restricting the alowed actions of program

They already had Silverlight! For Windows Phone 7. Then they killed that off too and expected the "plethora" of WP7 apps to be rebuilt for WP8 (requiring the beloved Windows 8 desktop OS for this task). Then they again expected developers to throw that away in favor of UWP for Windows 10, which unified the desktop and phone OSes. By then it was too late.

Old apps still ran on the newer OSes but the SDKs became dead-ends.

> (Win11 reverts).

I must've missed that one. What did they revert?