Universal Windows Platform no more? Microsoft says 'no plans to release WinUI 3 for UWP in a stable way'

Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP), once touted as the future of Windows development, will not be getting updated for WinUI 3 according to current plans, software giant said in a community call.

The WinUI Community Call yesterday was conducted on Google's YouTube platform "because Teams wasn't always accessible/allowed in some work environments," said WinUI Program Manager Ryan Demopoulos in the chat. The session began with a quick definition of terms – sorely needed in the confusing world of Microsoft's user interface frameworks for Windows.

"WinUI is the native UI platform for Windows 10 and Windows 11," said Microsoft program manager Ana Wishnoff. She explained that "WinUI 2 is the 2nd generation of the native UX stack in Windows. It's built for UWP apps. WinUI 3 is a new 3rd generation of the native UX stack in Windows. It consolidates the UX technologies previously built into Windows into a single decoupled framework that ships as part of the Windows App SDK, previously known as Project Reunion."

As the docs explain, WinUI 2 has some limitations versus WinUI 3. WinUI 2 does not support .NET 5.0, only an older variety of .NET called .NET Native. It does not support the Chromium-based WebView2 control, but only the old Edge-based WebView 1.x control.

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