windows apps

Free alternatives are no longer compromise tools — in 2026 they’ve matured into first‑choice replacements for many paid Windows apps, saving users money while delivering comparable, and sometimes superior, results. cription fatigue, rising prices, and the arrival of accessible AI features have...

If you rely on the Microsoft Store as your sole source of Windows apps, you’re missing some of the most useful, time-tested tools power users and everyday PC owners still turn to every day. A recent roundup revived an old truth: despite big improvements to the Store in 2024–2025, several...

Microsoft’s weekly roundup of fresh Windows 8 apps leans heavily on casual gaming this week, but it also highlights a small cluster of productivity and educational tools that show how the Windows Store still served a varied audience—even as Microsoft prepared to shift the platform’s direction...

This week’s tech roundups landed at two predictable but important intersections: a compact BetaNews sweep of practical Microsoft Store finds and platform notes for Windows users, and a high‑profile push from the Linux desktop camp with Zorin OS 16.3 — a release the project pitches as a friendly...

This week’s BetaNews roundups deliver the familiar mix Windows users expect: a tightly curated “App of the Week” and a string of small-but-useful Microsoft Store discoveries, balanced against a handful of platform-level changes—most notably developer tooling updates and a Surface Pro 3 UEFI...

This week’s BetaNews roundup of new and updated Windows apps underscores two parallel trends: small, sharply focused utilities that squeeze everyday productivity gains out of narrow features, and established open-source tools adding quality-of-life improvements for power users — a pattern that...

This week’s BetaNews roundups deliver the familiar mix of small, focused utilities, indie and mobile-to-Windows ports, and a handful of platform-level items that matter to power users and IT professionals alike; the two installments under review curate hits such as Tubecast Pro, Polarr Photo...

BetaNews’ latest weekly roundups distilled a familiar but useful pattern for Windows users: a single standout “App of the Week,” a handful of focused utilities and game ports, and a pair of platform-level updates that matter to power users and IT teams alike. Background / Overview BetaNews’...

This week’s Windows Store roundup brings a mix of polished mobile ports, useful utilities, and a couple of pleasant surprises — from an instructional yoga app that promises a complete practice library to a high‑octane hydrojet racer that finally feels at home on PCs. Highlights include the...

Amazon Prime Video subscribers are reporting rising frustration: higher prices, more ads, confusing rental paywalls — and now a fresh surge of complaints about the Prime Video Windows app crashing repeatedly on laptops and desktop PCs, leaving viewers who prefer a PC-based experience stuck...

The Instagram app has finally landed on Windows 10 PCs and tablets, bringing a fuller, native Instagram experience to desktop-class devices while also exposing a set of hardware and design trade-offs that every Windows user should understand before installing. Background Microsoft and Facebook...

Resetting an app in Windows 10 is a blunt-but-effective way to fix crashes, corrupted settings, failed updates and startup errors — and it’s one of the fastest tools in the Windows troubleshooting toolbox. This guide explains the when, why and how of resetting apps on Windows 10, walks through...

Every fresh Windows 11 installation ships with a grab bag of first‑party apps—some genuinely useful, some quietly redundant, and a handful that feel like marketing dressed up as convenience—and ZDNet’s pragmatic “11 I keep / 11 I ditch” checklist is one of the clearest, user‑centric guides for...

Windows users are waking up to a simple — and costly — reality: many of the most popular desktop apps are now web apps in disguise, and that design choice is silently inflating RAM usage, causing sluggishness, shorter battery life, and harder choices about how much memory your next laptop needs...

Windows power users already know that the best apps don’t always come from the company that makes the operating system — and some of the most quietly indispensable tools in the Windows ecosystem were born on Linux, then ported across because they solved real problems better than the native...

I want to learn a programming language. If I wanted to add an app to the Microsoft Store, what is the procedure? I know that Apple charges developers $99/year to be a developer. Does Microsoft charge as well? Assuming that I'm able to add the app to the Store, what is the procedure?

Microsoft Store apps live inside a heavily protected folder — C:\Program Files\WindowsApps — and while Windows intentionally hides and locks this location, there are safe, supported ways to view a single app’s installation folder, and riskier options for full access when absolutely necessary...

Google’s new “Cameyo by Google” brings Windows app streaming natively into ChromeOS and the Chrome browser, presenting legacy Windows applications as lightweight, browser‑streamed remote apps rather than full Windows desktops — a tactical move aimed at lowering the enterprise friction for moving...

When you unbox a fresh Windows laptop, the gap between a clean desktop and a productive machine is almost always bridged by a handful of lightweight, reliable apps — the kind you install the instant Windows finishes setting itself up. Alex Wawro’s short Tom’s Guide checklist of “seven free...

Open‑source software gives Windows users a fast, private, and flexible path away from closed ecosystems — and ZDNet’s compact list of “10 open‑source apps I always recommend Windows users try — and they’re free” is a practical starter kit for anyone ready to swap proprietary defaults for...