As part of the annual Microsoft Build 2022 conference taking place these days, many interesting announcements took place, including the Arm version of Visual Studio 2022 and the Dev Box cloud service . Along with this, it was announced that the Microsoft Store is now available for all Win32 applications. Prior to this, applications were added to the site in the order of the queue, and moderation took a long time.

Image Source: Mark Hachman / IDG

It was also said that developers will soon be able to advertise their products in the Microsoft Store through the use of the Microsoft Advertising platform. According to available data, only registered developers who have at least one application published in the software giant’s store will be able to advertise their products.

The Microsoft Store will also receive support for automatically restoring previously downloaded apps, which can be useful, for example, when switching to a new Windows 11 PC. In addition, suggestions from the Microsoft Store will be displayed in the results of internal Windows search.

The Microsoft Store’s main problem right now is related to a small assortment of products, and it seems that in order to quickly fill the site with content, the software giant has simplified the publication of software. This approach will help solve the problem with the assortment, but at the same time, Microsoft risks filling its store with low-quality applications, despite the fact that they will be moderated before publication. Microsoft did not release exact numbers, but announced that in the first quarter of 2022, the number of PC apps and games published on the site increased by more than 50% compared to the same period last year.

Another issue the Microsoft Store may face is the company’s ability to control malware and duplicates. Obviously, Microsoft will try to fill the store with quality applications, but this will become more difficult as the number of published products increases.