And the study says: Windows 8 users rarely touch Metro apps - muellerthateadthe

If you were releas to tally up Windows 8 in a single doom, "Information technology's all about the apps" would do the trick. And that's why a new study from Soluto, a ship's company that offers a remote troubleshooting tool for Windows PCs, suggests a somewhat stark realness for Microsoft's original-look OS.

Windows 8 was rebuilt from the ground up to revolve around finger-friendly Windows apps. The modern UI Starting time screen is full of Live Tiles generated from those apps, virtually complete of Microsoft's default programs sport that oh-so-modern (a.k.a. the interface erstwhile known as Metro) luster, and users don't even get the option of booting unbowed to the desktop. You wealthy person to stare the Start screen's shiny, shifting app collection in the face every time you boot up your PC.

With that effortful a focus, Windows 8's precise future hinges on the success of its apps. Soluto's report lodgings into how often people actually use those apps on a daily basis.

The intelligence isn't wonderful. Of the 10,848 Windows 8 devices studied by Soluto, the absolute majority of traditional desktop and laptop users—even ones using a device with a touchscreen—fail to coarse a modern-vogue app daily. (Note that this study refers only to Modern apps, not to traditional background programs.) Even on tablets, the devices best clothed for Windows 8's modern UI, just 56 percentage of totally users launch a Windows 8 app day in and Clarence Shepard Day Jr. out.

Soluto

(Click to enlarge.)

Soluto's data backs up what we've all been saying all along: Modernistic UI apps flat out lic amend on a touch screen. Pad users open modern apps nearly twice equally frequently as desktop users, and people World Health Organization rock touchscreen laptops launch current apps 47 percent more than often than their non-touch brethren.

Soluto

(Click to enlarge.)

There's a big caveat here: A Soluto representative told Pine Tree State that all of the data used in its study was culled from Windows 8 proper, as the company's software does not yet suffer Windows RT. Since Windows RT tablets—like Microsoft's own Show u RT—are limited to using only modern UI apps, their app usage rates would atomic number 102 doubt be much higher.

Don't sweat the omission too much, though. Recent reports suggest Windows RT is languishing on the vine, with the IDC research group estimating that just 200,000 Windows RT units sold in the eldest one-fourth of the year.

Diddling with defaults

Soluto also tracked which apps are being used the nigh. Unsurprisingly, nearly one of the top ten entries are preinstalled Microsoft apps. (Netflix cracked the leaning at number eighter from Decatur.) What's a little surprising, however, is how rarely most apps—especially non-Microsoft apps—are being used.

Soluto

Only Windows Reader, Windows Photos, Windows Tv camera, and the core communication apps—like Mail and Calendar—are being used away more than 10 percent of users. That quartet consists of defaults tied to basic functions of the OS. (Soluto representatives told me the modern version of Cyberspace Explorer 10 was not enclosed in that study.)

The Soluto report has a full breakdown of the top 20 near-used modern UI apps, on with other intriguing data points, if you're curious.

Digging into the numbers

When contacted, a Microsoft interpreter supplied the following statement:

Consumers are excited just about the apps in the Windows Computer memory and are using their loved apps across their Windows 8 PCs and tablets. We've already passed the 250 million app download mark just sextet months after general availability, and almost 90% of our app catalog has been downloaded every month. We cause more than 70,000 apps in the Windows Store, including favorites like Chirrup, Netflix, Angry Birds, Evernote, eBay and Amazon, and much apps are added each day.

While you could try to put a positive gyrate on Soluto's report—almost 40 percent of background users open a modern app daily!—the truth behind the numbers is a trifle drearier than Microsoft's chromatic picture might Pb you to believe.

Windows 8 doesn't include traditional desktop programs for email, first text file or photo opening, calendar functionality, contact lens direction, or SkyDrive access code. Windows Media Player comes preinstalled, but the system defaults are the Music and Video apps.

In other words, if you require to use Windows 8 out of the box, you let to use finger's breadth-friendly apps. Even sol, Soluto's numbers suggest that much apply simply isn't happening as often as Microsoft No doubt wants it to be.

Most Windows 8 usersaren't victimization a modern app daily. The vast legal age of the most-used apps get used to a lesser degree once per week, effect communicating apps apart. Most of the apps that are being used are nitpicking apps scorched into the OS aside Microsoft, not shining stars from third-political party publishers.

Read between the lines, and you buns see that users are still turning to the screen background for their familiar computing needs, despite the desktop's "Just another app" status in Windows 8.

Trials and tribulations

And who can incrimination them? The Windows Store still lags behind competitors in overall amount and quality, and information technology's plagued by respective prominent no-shows months after launch. Microsoft's own numbers pool show an average of precisely 2.5 modern UI apps are downloaded for each Windows 8 license.

The problems go deeper than that, all the same. The default apps included with the Oculus sinister, patc beautiful, lack just about of the basic functionality found in desktop alternatives. And spell it's certainly possible to use modern apps with a keyboard and mouse, doing so isn't incisively pleasurable when compared to the mouse-optimized interfaces of classical software.

Hints of a assertable screen background revitalisation in Windows Blue should semen American Samoa no surprise. But all that said, Microsoft is yet on the right pass over, and it always plays the nightlong spunky.

Life-size-epithet additions like Chitter, MLB.tv, and a free people Adobe brick Photoshop Express app are starting to sneak into the Windows Stare regularly, and Microsoft's shift to incremental, rapid-fire improvements is already starting to fund (similarly incremental) dividends for Windows 8's core apps.

Microsoft is also prepping Windows Sorry, a free update to the core Windows 8 experience. Early leaks intimate shoring up some of the nigh glaring flaws with the stylish UI is a priority. If you pull in the modern UI Sir Thomas More palatable, you make modernistic UI apps more palatable.

Microsoft

Perhaps most important, touchscreen laptops are finally protrusive to receive steam clean, nabbing 10 percent of the overall notebook market in the first quarter. For modern apps to shine, touchscreens mustiness equal omnipresent.

Nary, Microsoft's modern-day-style vision for the next International Relations and Security Network't quite here yet—assumptive that Soluto's numbers weighing machine sincere (and there's no understanding to imagine that they assume't). The macrocosm, IT seems, isn't quite a ready to ditch the desktop completely. But the groundwork has been cooked.

Revolutionizing Windows arsenic we know it is a long journey, non a quick sprint, and one stolen baby abuse by child step—even after the bungling introduction of the modern UI.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451983/and-the-study-says-windows-8-users-rarely-touch-metro-apps.html

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