In The Future Windows Will Update All Your Apps And Your Smartphone Won’t Have Any Apps At All?

Time To Update Your Dystopian Nightmares

Microsoft have come up with a bold new plan to terrify systems administrators everywhere, a new update orchestration platform based on their Windows Update infrastructure.  Their inspiration has come from the belief that users and admins feel that “Updates across the Windows ecosystem can feel like a fragmented experience.”  To resolve this problem Microsoft thinks they’ve discovered they have a new update orchestration will support anything packaged as MSIX, APPX, or traditional Win32 installers, be it driver or application.   Once you upload your package and have it properly onboarded you can then use the new system to push updates, simply go through the same steps to package the update in an acceptable format and Windows Update will push them to your users.

There are benefits to having more updates dealt with via Windows Update, though most companies that are interested in this have either started using Intune or use a competitor’s software and update management product.  Why Microsoft is looking to offer a service that duplicates Intune will be worrying for those that have already spent the time and effort to move to that cloud platform.  Any sane systems administrator will also worry about turning Windows Update into a single point of failure for their fleet; we all know exactly how reliable Windows Update is, not to mention it’s rather hard to push a network or RAID driver to a system that is having a fresh version of Windows installed and requires that third party driver to either load the OS or connect to the internet.

If that wasn’t enough to give you indigestion, in a recent interview OnePlus co-founder and Nothing CEO, Carl Pei suggested that not only are smartphones the best usage case for AI, but once you have an AI powered phone you won’t need apps anymore.  He suggests that the “the iPod was not launched as ‘an MP3 player with a hard disk drive.’ The hard disk drive was merely a means to a better user experience“.  He feels that an AI powered smartphone would be similar, and that once the OS is AI powered it will act as a smart agent to do what the user wants without the need for apps.  It’s not clear how that will help you join a meeting or watch TikTok videos but it is the future he envisages.