If you’re the owner of a new Surface Pro X or another device with an ARM-based chipset, Microsoft is making your life a bit easier. The company has updated the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 so apps and games that are incompatible with ARM-devices no longer show up in the store.
It’s not clear when exactly this update first rolled out, but it first appeared sometime this week with version 11911.1001.8.0. Once this update is installed, searching for apps will yield more relevant results on devices with an ARM processor such as Microsoft’s brand new Surface Pro X.
This means you’ll no longer see apps such as Affinity Photo, or games such as Gears 5, which are incompatible with Windows 10 on ARM. However, the feature isn’t quite as foolproof, as other apps and games might which won’t work still show up in results. Windows Central reports that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and select Xbox Game Pass titles still appear in search results.
App compatibility has been a highly controversial part of Windows 10 on ARM, especially with the recent release of the Surface Pro X. Developers need to recompile their apps or games for the ARM64 architecture for them to work on devices with ARM processors like the Surface Pro X or the Samsung Galaxy Book 2.
Some of Microsoft’s own apps like the Office 365 suite are available in the Microsoft Store in the ARM64 version, but others are not, including Microsoft Teams. The company also doesn’t yet have an ARM64 version of its new Chromium-based Edge browser just yet, and it won’t natively support ARM64 chipsets at launch. In the meantime, it is recommended to stick to the older version of Microsoft Edge or use the 32-bit version of Chromium-Edge through emulation, at the cost of battery life and performance.
