Microsoft to shut down its Stores for Business and Education – Times of India

Microsoft’s online app store — called Microsoft Store — is shutting down its Microsoft Store for Business and Microsoft Store for Education sections. The company made this announcement via a blog post. As per the blog post, “Starting in the first half of 2022 you will be able to find applications from the entire breadth of the Microsoft Store catalog and deploy to your managed devices all from within Microsoft Intune.”
Microsoft said that the Stores for Business and Education will be ‘retired’ in the first quarter of 2023. Further, the company said that there will be no support for these stores on Windows 11. “However, admins can still leverage the connection to Store for Business and Education, from their UEM solution to deploy apps to managed Windows 11 devices, until they are retired in 2023,” explained Microsoft in the blog post.
The company also explained why it had created the stores in the first place. “We created the Microsoft Store for Business and Microsoft Store for Education, enabling you to make specific apps available in your own private store. We linked the Microsoft Store for Business and Microsoft Store for Education to their respective Intune and Intune for Education cloud services to make it easier for you to deliver Store apps to your endpoints using the same tools you were already using to manage devices.”
In related news, with the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft revealed that for the first time users will be able to run and download Android apps on their PCs. The Android apps support will come as and when Windows 11 is made public to the users. As of now it still remains in beta phase with only certain users able to download and experience it.