The Best Microsoft Store Apps for Windows 10

The selection of universal apps in the Microsoft Store is better than ever. Their design and usability have dramatically improved, and Microsoft has largely got the problem of fake and imposter apps under control.

We’ve rounded up some of the best Microsoft Store apps. Make sure you let us know what we missed in the comments at the end.

Jump Ahead: Cloud Storage | Food and Drink | Image and Photo Editors | Music Players | News and Sport | Productivity | Reading | Shopping | Social Networking and Communication | Utilities | Video Players

Cloud Storage

Dropbox and OneDrive have official apps for Windows 10, and there’s also an unofficial Google Drive client you should check out.

Dropbox

The Dropbox app lets you access your photos, documents, and videos from any device. It also supports file sharing, collaboration, and automatic syncing of Microsoft Office files.

OneDrive

OneDrive is Microsoft’s flagship cloud storage service. For people who don’t want to deal with the somewhat fiddly desktop folder, the app is a great alternative.

G Drive

Google has not made an official app for its Drive service. Instead, you’ll have to use a third-party app. We like G Drive; it provides most of the functionality of the official web app.

Food and Drink

Cooking isn’t for everyone, but if you have an interest in getting to grips with one of life’s most vital skills, having a computer on hand is particularly useful. Touchscreen devices like Windows tablets are of considerable use in the kitchen, along with these apps.

Recipe+ Nutrition Profiler ($8)

Designed to display nutrition information for existing recipes or ones you create. It works offline and features a database of over 12,000 food types. It is a great way to find out just what foods in your diet are healthy and where you can make improvements.

Recipe Keeper

Recipe Keeper is a recipe organizer, shopping list manager, and meal planner. You can add and organize your own creations and import recipes from external sites. You can also add ingredients to a shopping list directly from your recipes with a single click.

Image and Photo Editors

Whether you’re editing photos or creating a work of digital art from scratch, Windows 10 has on offer several great tools, free and paid, to help you achieve your finished piece.

Fotor

Fotor is an all-in-one photo editor. It’s a worthy replacement if you don’t like Adobe Photoshop.

Alongside basic editing tools, it also offers visual effects, quick enhance, RAW file conversion, and even a collage creator. Furthermore, it’s recently been upgraded has now has improved support for EXIF data.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Not everyone needs the expensive full-featured version of Photoshop, but there are lots of times you’ll need something more powerful than MS Paint.

A great option is Adobe Photoshop Express. It’s designed to be an on-the-go photo editor. Features include basic alternations like crop, straighten, rotate, and flip, one-touch adjustments for brightness, exposure, and shadows, and slider controls for exposure, contrast, clarity, and vibrancy.

If you have an Adobe ID, you can download additional plugins.

Fhotoroom

Fhotoroom is an excellent photo app that was migrated from Windows Phone. It has a collection of basic editing tools and over 70 styles, frames, filters, and light leaks.

Fresh Paint

Fresh Paint is an easy to use painting/art Windows 10 app with an simple learning curve. As such it’s ideal for kids and adults, all you need is a desire to paint!

If you’re using a tablet with a stylus, such as on the Surface Pro, this app suddenly becomes all the more powerful.

Gallery HD

This apps lets you find photos and videos on your computer, network, or external storage and enjoy them in stunning slideshows with fade and zoom effects.

Music Players

Rock out with your Windows 10 computer thanks to this collection of MP3 players and audio streaming apps.

TuneIn Radio

Does it get better than free internet radio? The popular mobile radio streaming app is available as a Windows app. You can listen to almost any channel in the world, saving you the hassle of finding the right stream in your browser.

VEVO

This app provides access to the amazing free VEVO service, where videos, live concerts, and new artists await. You might need to pay for some popular live events.

The app has a continuous play mode for when you need some permanent background music.

Musixmatch

First and foremost, Musixmatch is a leading music recognition app. Like Soundhound and Shaazam, you let the app listen to a snippet of a track on the TV or radio and it will search its huge database for a match.

It also doubles as a music player; import your library and Musixmatch can add lyrics, album artwork, and other important metadata.

News and Sport

With so much going on in the world, it’s vital to stay abreast of current events. And if the daily news ever becomes too much to handle, at least you check the latest happenings at your favorite sports team!

News 360

News 360 is one of the best news aggregators. It pulls stories from multiple sources to give you a live feed of things you’re interested in.

The more you use the app, the better it gets. It will learn which subjects and topics you like the most and tailor your feed accordingly. If you give it permission, it can even use data from your Facebook and Twitter account to help it improve.

Google News Viewer

Google News Viewer is not an official Google product, but don’t let that put you off. It looks beautiful and makes reading your news a breeze.

Newsstand

Newsstand is the third news aggregator on the list but it offers a couple of features that warrant its inclusion.

Firstly, you can add any site to the app using the Additions form. Secondly, you can create a Favorites list of your preferred sources, and finally, it has a built-in list of the most popular sites for easy navigation.

Newsflow

Newsflow is an RSS reader which is designed with the news in mind. Its key features are breaking news notifications, pinnable live titles for specific topics or sources, and searchable keywords.

It can also play YouTube videos and GIFs in-app, thus making it a one-stop shop for all your news needs.

MSN Sports

MSN Sports is the default Microsoft sports app. It comes pre-installed on your system, but if you deleted it years ago then forgot all about it, you should give it a second chance.

You can add teams and leagues, read the latest stories across hundreds of sports from countless services, and even enable notifications for live scores and breaking news. If you’re especially interested in sports from a certain country, you can change the region within the app.

Eurosport

Eurosport publishes more than 150 articles a day on a wide variety of sports. Whether you want news or long-form featured content, you will find it in this app.

There’s also a huge amount of video content, so if you prefer to watch rather than read, this is a must-have.

Productivity

Like any computer platform, Windows 10 is designed for productivity as well as entertainment. Here are some of the best apps for using while you’re working.

Copy Space

Copying and pasting are incredibly useful and simple. If you have to move a lot of content, however, constantly bouncing back and forth between apps can quickly become frustrating.

Try using Copy Space instead. It’s a universal clipboard that can store several items at once. All your copies are sorted into categories, and it can sync between all your devices.

Drawboard PDF ($8)

One of the PDF’s biggest annoyances is the lack of editing options. Although Drawboard PDF doesn’t let you edit text, you can draw all over PDF files to annotate them. The aim is to reduce the number of times you will need to print a sheet to make notes on it.

It also includes some other useful tools, including the ability to merge and reorder documents, measure lengths and angles, and overlay grids and other templates.

Xodo PDF Reader and Editor

The free Xodo PDF Reader and Editor is an impressively full-featured PDF app. You can write on documents, annotate in real-time with other users, and make notes on blank documents so you can print them later. There is even a night mode so you can work at night without straining your eyes.

Bing Translator

Google Translate isn’t the only show in town. There are lots of great translation apps out there. One of the best is Microsoft’s product.

The translation quality of Microsoft’s tool is just as good as Google Translate, it works offline, and it’ll sit happily in your taskbar for easy access.

OneNote

Microsoft no longer releases the OneNote app as a standalone desktop app; you will need to install the Microsoft Store version.

Luckily, it’s just as full-featured as its predecessor—long-time OneNote users shouldn’t notice much difference.

Money Lover—Money Manager

There are lots of family budgeting desktop apps trying to grab your attention. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even try making your own budgeting spreadsheet in Excel.

Or, you could consider Money Lover—Money Manager.

You can track your money across long time periods, it comes with a financial calendar that’ll send you alerts and notifications, it includes lots of useful (and free) graphs and charts, and it works in multiple currencies.

Code Writer

Are you looking for easy-to-use code editor apps? Code Writer has you covered.

It’s been around since the early days of Windows 8 and has built a loyal following of fans. It comes with active syntax highlighting, supports more than 20 file types, and has a live tile that displays both the names and save states of your open documents.

Interestingly, it also supports several cloud storage services, so you can take your project with you wherever you go.

Reading

Whether you’re using a tablet computer, a desktop, laptop, or hybrid, reading apps are vital to digesting information from the latest bestsellers to reports in PDF format.

Overdrive

Overdrive has a global network of more than 34,000 libraries which you can use to borrow eBooks, audiobooks, and videos.

Anything you borrow will automatically sync across all your devices and the library is open 24/7. The app also doubles as an eReader, so you can do your borrowing and reading through the same interface.

Best of all titles are automatically returned at the end of their loan period—you’ll never have to pay a late fee again!

(Note: You need to be a member of your local library to access the app)

Book Bazaar Reader

Why do you need to pay for eBooks when apps like Book Bazaar Reader are out there? It scrapes lots of sources of free publications (including Guttenberg, Flibusta, FeedBooks, FreeBooks, and ManyBooks), then presents all the results to you in one easy-to-use interface.

The app supports EPUB, MOBI, FB2, PDF, and TXT formats, and has cool additional features like annotating and highlighting.

Freda

If you don’t like the interface of Bazar Book Reader, check out Freda. The principle of the app is the same; it gives you 50,000 free titles you can download and read. It supports EPUB, FB2, HTML, and TXT files and you can even import your own DRM-free books to use in the eReader.

Kindle

This app gives you access to over one million books on the Kindle Store. All the titles can sync across all your devices. What are you waiting for? Get reading!

Audible

Who’s got time to read books these days? Between commuting to work, updating Facebook statuses, and feeding the dog, most of us don’t have a spare minute in our days.

That’s why audiobooks have grown in popularity over the last few years. They let you drive, update Facebook, and feed the dog at the same time, all while still managing to give your brain a fix of quality literature.

The Audible app has all the features you’d expect. They also recently added streaming, so you don’t need to download a book to listen to it.

News Live Tiles

The Microsoft News app is a nice idea. The app is constantly being improved; if you haven’t used it for a while, you should give it another chance.

Unfortunately, the live tile isn’t so useful; it cannot display all the information you care about. The reality is, it’s impossible for the app to display all those headlines in such a small box.

The solution is to download News Live Tiles. It’s a glorified RSS reader that allows you to create feeds for any site you want. The headlines from those sites are then displayed in the live titles. You can have as many tiles as you want.

Nextgen Reader ($6)

Originally designed as a Google Reader Windows 10 app, this tool now offers support for many other RSS feed reading services and has grown beyond its initial purpose into an extremely usable reader, complete with sharing options.

Shopping

Your Windows 10 computer is a hub for the online marketplace. You can connect to the likes of Amazon or eBay and make your purchases, directly from within a dedicated app. Who needs a browser?

Newegg

Are you looking for cheap deals and bargain prices on electronics and tech? You need Newegg. The online-only retailer has 10.5 million products and will deliver to your door.

Amazon

Using this Amazon Windows 10 app is faster than using the website. Search is fast and processing purchases is efficient—try it!

CPlus for Craigslist

Whether you’re looking for something for sale, somewhere to live, or even somewhere to work, this remarkable Windows 10 app lets you win at using Craigslist. Previously known as Craigslist+.

Social Networking and Communication

Do you chat online? Enjoy Facebook and Twitter? Perhaps you socialize on Reddit? Check out these awesome options.

Facebook

This app offers a superior Facebook experience that arguably exceeds the web version of the popular social networking site.

Messenger

Ever since Microsoft made changes to universal apps and allowed them to be operated from the taskbar, they’ve become a lot more useful. Even then, however, some apps just don’t work very well as universal apps. One exception is Facebook Messenger.

If you’re the type of person who’s always using the service to chat with friends, having a dedicated taskbar icon can be really handy. Unlike the universal Skype app, which is shockingly stripped of features, the Messenger app retains the functionality you’re used to from its website counterpart.

Baconit

Baconit is the highest rated Reddit app in the store. It offers everything you’d expect from a Reddit app, including comment flairs, support for multiple user accounts, and extensive search parameters.

Twitter

Though the app is a touch limited compared to some of the alternatives, the offocial Twitter client nevertheless offers everything you would expect as well as the Discover tool to find trends and follow suggestions.

Tweeten

Twitter power users will be well aware of TweetDeck. It’s the only reliable web app for managing multiple Twitter accounts from one place.

In terms of functionality, Tweeten is almost identical—but it’s designed specifically for Windows 10. It supports lists, notifications, direct messages, and the Activity Feed. There’s even a way to search for and save GIFs.

Utilities

Windows 10 is a virtual toolbox. It can be your search tool, your calculator, and even your digital nightstand.

Network Speed Test

We’ve all lived in a place with a dodgy internet connection at some point in our lives. Perhaps the speed fluctuates wildly or your connection is prone to dropping out. Sadly, internet service providers rarely have much inclination to do anything about it—they’re getting your money and they’re happy.

It’s frustrating to try and build up a body of evidence to present to them. Speed test websites are full of adverts and they don’t log your historical results.

Network Speed Test rectifies the problem. It’s got a clean interface, it’s lightning fast, and it logs past network performance history in easy-to-understand charts.

Speed Test by Ookla

If you’re looking for a simpler version of Network Speed Test, check out Speed Test by Ookla. The company’s website is one of the best ways to find out the speed of your internet connection, and the web app is no different.

The app will test your ping, upload, and download speeds, and display all the data in beautifully presented real-time graphs. It’ll even keep a log of previous tests so you can track how your speed varies over time.

Advanced Password Generator

By now, everyone should know about the importance of using strong passwords. As password hacks become more common, failure to do so have genuinely catastrophic real-world consequences.

But making strong passwords isn’t always easy; there are so many facets of password creation you need to remember. Instead, why not let the Advanced Password Generator do it for you?

It can use a combination of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and punctuation to make your password as secure as possible.

Video Players

Do you like watching TV and movies? How about streaming content from popular subscription services? You need these apps.

Plex

Plex and Kodi are the two biggest names in the home theater world. Kodi doesn’t have a Windows Store app, but Plex does.

It will let you access any videos, photos, and music that you have on your server via your Windows PC. To supercharge your experience, you should install some of the best unofficial Plex channels.

Netflix

Enjoy TV episodes, movies, and original content from the world’s leading streaming subscription service. This Netflix app is comparable with the browser interface, and in some ways better. You can watch in 4K if you have a suitable monitor.

Hulu

Hulu offers a mix of on-demand series and movies and live TV. If you want live TV, your subscription will cost you more money.

VLC

The Swiss army knife of media players has been a long-time favorite of users. Unfortunately, it can be a bit aggressive on your battery life.

The Windows Store app is lighter and less resource-heavy. It supports video, audio, MKV, and FLAC playback, and lets you manage your media library.

Tubecast for YouTube

As more and more people cut the cord, YouTube has emerged as a popular way for users to get their entertainment fix.

Sadly, you won’t find an official YouTube app in the Windows Store, but Tubecast is the next best thing. It acts as a YouTube client and can stream content to smart TVs, Chromecasts, Amazon Fire TVs, Rokus, PlayStations, Xboxes, and any DLNA-enabled gadget.

What Are Your Favorite Microsoft Store Apps?

Have you found an app that you’d like to recommend to your fellow readers? Have we missed your favorite app off the list? Or do all the offerings still leave you unconvinced? Let us know your thoughts, opinions, and recommendations in the comments below.

And if you’d like to learn more about Windows 10 apps, read our list of neglected software that you should check out.

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Instagram outage forces millions to look directly at the world for nearly half an hour

Photo-sharing app and social network Instagram was briefly taken offline on Monday afternoon, causing nothing of consequence to occur other than a brief respite from one source of the constant deluge of inconsequential information to which we all voluntarily submit ourselves.

The service died at about 4:20, tragically the very moment when millions of people were turning to the app, for the third time that hour, desperately hoping to pass the time until the end of the workday. At least this was the case on the west coast of the U.S., the only location we are considering at this time.

The app launched fine but did not refresh feeds, and users were unable to scroll past however many posts were already cached; stories, which are also cached, were accessible but couldn’t be posted. I was able to send messages, but others weren’t.

Amazingly, even the website went down, and hard. Visitors received a “5xx Server Error,” which is not common — usually a server knows which of the various error codes to return. It seems to be back now, though.

The outage appeared to end, for some anyway, at about quarter of five, which means many of us are still at our desks, if we’re lucky enough to have them. If you were affected, here’s hoping your half hour was spent productively.

An Instagram representative told TechCrunch that they’re aware of the issue and working to fix it.

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Facebook drafts a proposal describing how its new content review board will work

In November, Facebook announced a new plan that would revamp how the company makes content policy decisions on its social network – it will begin to pass off some of the more contested decisions to an independent review board. The board will serve as the final level of escalation for appeals around reported content, acting something like a Facebook Supreme Court. Today, Facebook is sharing (PDF) more detail about how this board will be structured, and how the review process will work.

Facebook earlier explained that the review board wouldn’t be making the first – or even the second – decision on reported content. Instead, when someone reports content on Facebook, the first two appeals will still be handled by Facebook’s own internal review systems. But if someone isn’t happy with Facebook’s decisions, the case can make its way to the new review board to consider.

However, the board may not decide to take on every case that’s pushed up the chain. Instead, it will focus on those it thinks are the most important, the company had said.

Today, Facebook explains in more detail how the board will be staffed and how its decisions will be handled.

In a draft charter, the company says that the board will include experts with experience in “content, privacy, free expression, human rights, journalism, civil rights, safety, and other relevant disciplines.” The member list will also be public, and the board will be supported by a full-time staff who will ensure its decisions are properly implemented.

While decisions around the board makeup haven’t been made, Facebook is today suggesting the board should have 40 members. These will be chosen by Facebook after it publicly announces the required qualifications for joining, and says it will offer special consideration to factors like “geographical and cultural background,” and a “diversity of backgrounds and perspectives.”

The board will also not include former or current Facebook employees, contingent workers of Facebook or government officials.

Once this board is launched, it will be responsible for the future selection of members after members’ own terms are up.

Facebook believes the ideal term length is three years, with the term automatically renewable one time, for those who want to continue their participation. The board members will serve “part-time,” as well – a necessary consideration as many will likely have other roles outside of policing Facebook content.

Facebook will ultimately allow the board to have final say. It can reverse Facebook’s own decisions, when necessary. The company may then choose to incorporate some of the final rulings into its own policy development. Facebook may also seek out policy advice from the board, at times, even when a decision is not pressing.

The board will be referred cases both through the user appeals process, as well as directly from Facebook. For the latter, Facebook will likely hand off the more controversial or hotly debated decisions, or those where existing policy seems to conflict with Facebook’s own values.

To further guide board members, Facebook will publish a final charter that includes a statement of its values.

The board will not decide cases where doing so would violate the law, however.

Cases will be heard by smaller panels that consist of a rotating, odd number of board members. Decisions will be attributed to the review board, but the names of the actual board members who decided an individual case will not be attached to the decision – that’s likely something that will could them from directed threats and harassment.

The board’s decisions will be made public, though it will not compromise user privacy in its explanations. After the decision is issued, the board will have two weeks to publish its decision and explanation. In the case of non-unanimous decisions, a dissenting member may opt to publish their perspective along with the final decision.

Like a higher court would, the board will reference its prior opinions before finalizing its decision on a new case.

After deciding their slate of cases, the members of the first panel will choose a slate of cases to be heard by the next panel. That panel will then pick the third slate of cases, and so on. A majority of members on a panel will have to agree that a case should be heard for it to be added to the docket.

Because 40 people can’t reasonably represent the entirety of the planet, nor Facebook’s 2+ billion users, the board will rely on consultants and experts, as required, in order to gather together the necessary “linguistic, cultural and sociopolitical expertise” to make its decisions, Facebook says.

To keep the board impartial, Facebook plans to spell out guidelines around recusals for when a conflict of interest develops, and it will not allow the board to be lobbied or accept incentives. However, the board will be paid – a standardized, fixed salary in advance of their term.

None of these announced plans are final, just Facebook’s initial proposals.

Facebook is issuing them in draft format to gather feedback and says it will open up a way for outside stakeholders to submit their own proposals in the weeks ahead.

The company also plans on hosting a series of workshops around the world over the next six months, where it will get various experts together to talk about issues like free speech and technology, democracy, procedural fairness and human rights. The workshops will be held in Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, and other cities yet to be announced.

Facebook has been criticized for its handling of issues like the calls to violence that led to genocide in Myanmar and riots in Sri Lanka; election meddling from state-backed actors from Russia, Iran, and elsewhere; its failure to remove child abuse posts in India; the weaponization of Facebook by the government in the Philippines to silence its critics; Facebook’s approach to handling Holocaust denials or conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, and much more.

Some may say Facebook is now offloading its responsibility by referring the tough decisions to an outside board. This, after all, could potentially save the company itself from being held accountable for war crimes and the like. But on the other hand, Facebook has not shown itself capable of making reasonable policy decisions related to things like hate speech and propaganda. It may be time for it to bring in the experts, and let someone else make the decisions.

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App Store developers have earned $120 billion since 2008

Apple is kicking off the Entrepreneur Camp in Cupertino. 11 female-founded app development companies have been invited to Cupertino for multiple workshops and meetings with Apple employees. And Apple used that opportunity to share a new number when it comes to App Store revenue.

Since the creation of the App Store, Apple has given back $120 billion in revenue to App Store developers. It means that the App Store has generated more revenue than that in total. But if you remove Apple’s cut, $120 billion have been wired to developers.

App Store revenue is still growing rapidly as over $30 billion of developer revenue has been generated in the last twelve months alone. Apple reported $100 billion in developer revenue at WWDC back in June 2018.

Apple only counts direct App Store revenue, such as paid downloads, in-app purchases and subscriptions. Developers could have also generated more revenue through ads and subscriptions on a website for instance.

If you’re curious about the Entrepreneur Camp, Apple has invited the developers of Bites, Camille, CUCO: Lembrete de Medicamentos, Deepr, D’efekt, Hopscotch, LactApp, Pureple, Statues of the La Paz Malecón, WeParent and Seneca Connect. There will be a new session every quarter.

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