Why Microsoft’s best Windows app store is actually Github

The site for software developers to manage their projects, which Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire in 2018, is brimming with weird and wonderful indie apps that you can download for free.

Mon 19 - Jun - 2023 853 0

No disrespect to the Microsoft Store, but it’s not the most exciting place to discover new Windows software.

Peruse Microsoft’s official app store and you’ll mostly find the obvious, with apps like Word, Adobe Photoshop, and Zoom gracing the front pages. While the store does have some hidden gems, most of what’s on display feels a bit too squeaky clean. The site for software developers to manage their projects, which Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire in 2018, is brimming with weird and wonderful indie apps that you can download for free.

Of course, Github isn’t really an app store, and it’s not set up to help people discover it’s hidden treasures. But given the inventiveness on offer, maybe it should be.

Microsoft has been making its GitHub subsidiary more dependent on the company’s own Azure public cloud.

That lines up with Microsoft’s desire to increase the use of Azure, whose revenue was growing 40% in the second quarter, faster than any other major product category the company discloses every three months.

If you’re looking for surprise and delight, the real action is happening over on Github.

Great Apps on Github

MSEdgeRedirect: Search from the Start menu using your default search engine and browser.

The quintessential Github app is a bit geekier from your typical app store fare. Often it’s the product of a lone developer who wanted to fix a software annoyance for themselves and decided to share the results with the world. Some developers accept donations or charge for app store versions of their work, but everything you find on Github itself is free to download.

Explorer Patcher, which we covered recently, is a great example. It’s designed to restore taskbar labels and other features that Microsoft removed in Windows 11, all without having to perform any manual registry edits. Along a similar line, MS Edge Redirect routes web searches from the Windows Start menu to your default browser, using your search engine of choice. That way, you’re not forced to use Microsoft Edge and Bing when searching via the taskbar.

Some examples are even more subversive. YouTube-DL, for instance, lets you download YouTube videos through the Windows Command Prompt, and other developers have built spin-offs with full graphical interfaces, such as YT-DLG and Tartube. (A few years ago, Github pulled YouTube-DL in response to a takedown request from the music industry, but quickly reversed course under pressure from developers and activist groups.)

In some cases, great apps get their start on Github long before arriving in any app store. Auto Dark Mode, a sorely-needed Windows app for switching between dark and light system themes, first launched in Github in November 2018, nearly three years before making its way to the Microsoft Store. Lively Wallpaper, a great app for dynamic desktop backgrounds, popped up on Github in 2019, but didn’t launch a Microsoft Store version until last year. If you’re not averse to beta software, Github lets you try cool apps in their earliest stages. source