Microsoft renames "Remote Desktop" to "Windows App". Good luck googling for any help or troubleshooting it.

Oh, I can help remotely... I just need you to open Windows App.
Which app?
Windows App.
I get that, I'm running Windows, but which app?
Windows App.
Look, are you being smart? I'm in Windows, say I click on the Start button, which app do I click on?
Windows App.
Allright you, let's say the app is already running...
Sure.
And I press CTRL-ALT-DEL and open Task Manager.
OK.
WHAT'S THE NAME OF THE APP I WOULD SEE IN TASK MANAGER??!???
Windows App.
I'M ASKING YOU, 'WHAT'S THE NAME OF THE APP'???!??!??
I'm telling you, 'Windows App.'
- You did it so well, I started hearing it in their voices after a few lines. Well done.
  
  What's the original? Sounds as fun as 'Front fell off'

Microsoft seems lost, they're so interested in constantly changing everything to steal more of your information instead of just maintaining the massive lead they have.
They can't seem to just make something work, always manipulating the systems, and such none of it is very good, but when you try to be the best at everything you end up mediocre. Good thing they got a market lock when they did.
- Microsoft is a collection of fiefdoms, each led by a Lord (Product Manager) who drive projects which have two possible motivations: 1) promotion 2) bonus. Quality is not a factor and hasn't been for decades. Cohesion? No. The lords sometimes fight amongst themselves. They serve the line go up. Everything is line go up. There is no bottom to the products. Line must go up
  
  Yep, used to work for them, this is a very accurate and succinct analogy to use.
  True pioneers of corporate neofeudalism.
  
  Well said.
- I finally had enough about a year ago and decided to bite the bullet and just install Linux. I honestly expected to run into all kinds of problems, particularly since I primarily use my desktop for gaming, but I've been very surprised how few problems I've actually had. It's certainly not been completely problem free, but I wouldn't say I've encountered more problems with Linux than I have in Windows. Different problems for sure, but not more, and honestly about equally difficult to fix.
  
  I feel like there's more options to fix things in Linux. On windows it felt someone's your just got a brick wall with an issue just because Windows want designed around the fix you envisioned.
  
  What distro are you using? I really wanna take the leap and have the same worries
  
  I have a mini PC that I dual boot (separate drives), but struggle with Linux on it, I have a couple other systems running Linux (Mint), and since it only streams Jellyfin I just don't put the effort into the full switch. Biggest concern is my with comp, but can't do much about that
- We're still feeling the damage done by the Microsoft monopoly from the '90s. Only historians will be able to say how far they sent us back.

Even better than that, the old remote desktop app from the Windows store is being discontinued and has a banner at the top telling you to use the Windows app instead. The new Windows app does not support RDP on Windows:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/get-started-connect-devices-desktops-apps?tabs=windows-avd%2Cwindows-w365%2Cwindows-devbox%2Cmacos-rds%2Cmacos-pc&pivots=azure-virtual-desktop
- Did microsoft make a new protocol that isnt rdp? Or did they switch to a new one?
  I use rdp a lot to remote into work so if that changes, i need to know 😅
  
  It probably still uses rdp, but doesn't let you connect to your own instances, just the cloud ones.
  
  No they just have no replacement for it yet other than the inbuilt RDP app that comes with Windows (or third party apps). I don't believe the protocol itself is changing
- To be fair Store apps need to die. Any multi-user system and its a clusterfuck to keep them updated and secure.

You'd think a company that runs a search engine would understand SEO...
- They don't want you searching it. They want you to pay them to fix it. With Ai presumably
  
  AI still needs to be able to identify the thing you're asking about. The AI still searches for things if it's not already in its memory-it even tells you when it's scanning different sources.
  That all breaks with bad seo
- This would probably matter more if every search for "windows 10 problem XY" wouldn't turn up 100% garbage from their support forums anyway.
  
  Hello my name is Ranjid, im a MSVP, but not associated with Microsoft. Have you tried reinstalling Windows or talking to your system administrator?
  
  Have you tried SFC /scannow, dism repair, or factory reset?
- Anti-SEO pushes you to use AI to get help instead
  
  AI still uses SEO or it's database equivalent to figure out what you're talking about about. Or to scan for new info - which they currently do
- But if you can’t google a solution to a problem there is no problem.
- Yes, but I feel that's strategic to make us feel we need AI to do the work for us.
  
  Except the AI needs that info searchable for itself. L
  So, no. It's just dumb.
- I saw a video recently they said the google search being bad is intentional. Because then you have to spend more time on google, thus seeing more ads.
  That’s a bold move cotton. Let’s see how it plays out
- There's a reason why I never use Bing

recently, I need to remote desktop from Mac to Windows, and I was searching around for products, and I came across a blog post recommending Windows App, and I had no fucking idea what it was. I thought it may have been a windows 8 app that is discontinued. The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming. Xbox, Xbox 360, xbox One (which was actually the third iteration, for some reason), xbox series x/s. Like wtf.
- Windows 1, 2, 3, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7????, 8, 8.1, 10????, 11, 11 21H2, 11 22H2, .......
  
  When windows 9 comes out it will all work again.
  
  AFAIK, Windows was discontinued after Vista. Windows 7 is actually the 7^th iteration of the Microsoft version of OS/2, which was rebranded as Windows NT with the release of the third version, and as Windows sine NT with the seventh version. Windows 9 had to be skipped because a sloppy version check for Windows 95/98 would have failed.
- The geniuses at microsoft SUCK at naming
  Apple is worse. Everything has the same name but gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 as a suffix.
  
  At least the numbers are sequential there, though...
- don't worry, microsoft will surely make a discord where all their knowledge bases and information will be moved to, making it even easier to find info than it already is /s
  
  But first they'll buy Discord and force everyone to abandon their exiting usernames to use a Microsoft account with it instead.
- Same but - I was actually relieved Microsoft finally MADE an RDP client for Mac again. What was wrong with RDP for Mac? It was fine and they axed it. But them replacing RDP everywhere is just hilarious.
  
  They didn't even change anything except the ui. It's still just old rdp with less features.
- I don't work for them, but I'd recommend Jump Desktop for that. Works very well and has been out for quite some time.
- Autopilot and Autopilot Device Preparation spring to mind. Two distinct products, and yet they've gone down the Wii U naming route

Next in line, I guess they can call it just “App”.
Saw this yesterday which is relevant
- Is that Steve Jobs with a Butthead mouth? Beautiful.
  
  It definitely made me think of Jobs when I saw it. Not sure about the mouth part, but if thats what you see, its probably what was intended.

Did Microsoft leave their marketing department to AI or something? They really seem to be dropping the ball rn with app names, and recognition.
(Teams New vs. Teams (New))
- Outlook (deprecated)
  New Outlook
  Outlook
  New Outlook 3DS XL
  Outlook (new)
  Outlook (New)
  Microsoft Outlook
  
  Outlook (formerly Outlook New) for Live (formerly Outlook Cloud)
  
  You forgot the "classic" version(s?)... God dammit I hate it so much. Why? I can't even tell the difference and I'm the reactionary kinda guy that ditched Ubuntu over the gui switch in 2012!
  
  Outlook (classic)
  
  not to be outdone with "google meet" and "google meet (original)"
  
  This seals it for me. They aren't using version control but are making copies of the working directory with this result.
- AI would do a better job

Corporate brain rot. Or they want the ability it provides to die.
HBO Max -> Max -> HBO Max again
Tropicana removing fruit imagery from their fucking fruit juices
The 12 or more fucking copilots
Convert kit to Seva (or whatever)
Loads recently I'm forgetting
- Dell Latitude is now "Plus"
  
  Is it a laptop, an iPhone size? Is it a digital TV service? Is it a goddamn panty liner?
  WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE
- they want the ability it provides to die.
  Terminal Server licensing will be bringing them in a tidy amount of money from on-prem enterprises, but it's true that Windows App has a heavy focus on Azure and will definitely be aiming to push people in that direction - it can't even connect to remote Windows PCs.
- Twitter

The world is controlled by idiots and I'm told I'm the fool for not following along

Not to be confused with windows apps, the branded name for UWP apps.
- UWP has been deprecated for some time now. https://www.thurrott.com/dev/258377/microsoft-officially-deprecates-uwp
  
  as it pushes the desktop-focused Windows App SDK (formerly called Project Reunion) and WinUI 3 as the future of Windows application development.
  I didn't know there was a distinction between these and UWP. In any case, I'm pretty sure that these are also called windows apps.

Even "App App" would be better.
- that's the new name for the store now.
  
  great, OneDrive can become "Storage App", Outlook: "Mail App", Edge: "Internet App",... the possibilities are endless!

If I were on their developer team this shit would make me depressed for at least a week. Like, It's an objectively horrible idea, obviously pushed by someone from marketing or (worse) leadership. An intern can tell you why it's bad, a fucking llm can see it based on description alone.
Yet everyone have to live with it.
- a fucking llm can see it based on description alone.
  Even Copilot says it's not good:
  "is it smart to rename Remote Desktop (for Windows) to "Windows App"?"
  That would probably create more confusion than clarity! "Remote Desktop" is a specific tool that allows users to access a different computer remotely, while "Windows App" is an incredibly broad name that could refer to any application running on Windows. If Microsoft were to rename it that way, people might struggle to understand its purpose at a glance.
- Probably not marketing; they live and breathe SEO. My guess is they're trying to push service contracts, so they want to make their stuff impossible to look up.
- Everyone that uses windows. Pick a linux distro and forget these shit moves by shit companies
  
  People are using this in corporate environments. No one has a choice.

As a Visual Studio Professional user it’s so hard to google help for that too without VSCode leaking into the results.
- Damn, what do you mainly use it for? The Form designer?
  
  It’s our IDE of choice at work. Yeah we do some Windows forms stuff but mainly enterprise web applications now using C# .Net Entity Framework, GraphQL, and Typescript React.
  Our company is all in on MS, we have windows machines, use Azure etc.
  
  You realise visual studio has more features in professional worlds besides the old winforms formbuilder... Right?
  Let alone blazor runs better in visual studio than vscode..

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I've been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by "business idiots" now. People that don't really use or understand the product, and don't really understand the users or their needs. It's an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
- Thank you so much for posting this. I already liked Ed's work but this one was a cut above and it's going to be marinating in my head for the foreseeable future.
- zitron is godly

You just know somebody in that meeting suggested adding "copilot" in there somewhere.
- and got a promotion for it
  
  They added copilot to fucking Notepad
- office.com is moving to m365.cloud.microsoft, and renaming to microsoft 365 copilot.

Just keep using Remote Desktop Connection aka mstsc.exe?
It's even recommended by Microsoft:
Although replacements have been released, as of the release of the Windows App, Remote Desktop Client is still recommended for use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Remote_Desktop_Protocol_clients
- That's how Windows rolls out every unpopular feature.
  Simply don't upgrade it!
  You can prevent the upgrade with this setting.
  You can turn off the upgrade in the control panel.
  You can turn off the upgrade in the registry.
  It's a different place in the registry now.
  You can run a 3rd party app to make it stop.
  It's always been like this and you're being weird.
- That compatibility matrix, the windows app does not support connecting to Windows from Windows.... That's some amazing product planning there from Microsoft...
  
  This is the same company that has Outlook, Outlook.com, Free email app called outlook, and New Outlook... And none of them are the same fucking thing.

And the thing figured as I was on a corporate network, so it locked itself down and needs settings done by the office 365 administrator. They checked and apparently you need some paid tool to get it working. We're using an alternative now.
- Let me tell you about deleting a resource group in azure where it thinks a non-existent resource in that group is assigned to a subnet that is also in that group.
- What's the alternative?
  
  Remote desktop manager from devolutions.net at the moment. It's what our admins recommend.
  
  mRemoteNG is the one we use in our company. It's awesome.
  Edit: updated the spelling from Mremoteng for clarification

Can't be worse than using the letter "x".
- try googling "cannot connect to windows app" instead of "cannot connect to windows remote desktop"

Ahh windows. How I don’t miss you.
- Had been windows 10 user since 2015 (no pc before that), installed linux mint a month ago and was surprised how smooth everything was!
  Sorry windows but Im never coming back.

Still laughing my ass off... Imagine trying to Google for solutions to "windows app" :) :)
But we live in a world where Muskie renamed Twitter to X, so....some serious brain damage going on all over the place.
Im starting to feel smarter now, as an effect of these guys becoming dumber and dumber, so I guess thats a plus.
- Gnobody's laughing at our Krogram names now!

Makes sense, the CEO was just saying the other day that 30% of their code was written by AI

Microsoft never ceases to amaze me with anti consumer decisions.

MS hasnt improved for the user in about 20 years, not a surprise.
- Hey that's not fair, they recently added tabs to their file explore. I mean sure it has a shared history, so if you open a new tab and navigate, then return to the previous tab back takes to you their useless 'home screen', but still, there are tabs kinda!
  
  I mean sure it has a shared history
  Wait, you serious?

RDP, until they change the name of the protocol. I don't think that search term is corrupted yet.
- This is not about RDP, Windows App does not support RDP (yet).
  Remote Desktop Connection is a different piece of software than Remote Desktop App (a Windows store app)

On the phone (well, teams call): "Just open the windows app…"
- Opens notepad.exe
  This... this one?
  
  starts car
  how about now?

Office365 -> Copiot365
- It has already been renamed to Microsoft365.

I work in the window industry…like for buildings. I’m used to Microsoft constantly fucking up my queries

I didn't believe it until i verified it. This shit is true. Wtf! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/windows-app-to-replace-remote-desktop-app-for-windows/4390893
- Am I reading that wrong or is it just saying the Windows Store version (which was terrible) is going away. It tells you to use the normal remote desktop function that has existed in Windows until they put that new stupidly named app in the Store.
  So if you run RDP (can't tell if that's actually mstsc.exe now) it should function as normal.
  People should just be able to create their RDP shortcuts as normal and go on with their day by simply ignoring the Microsoft store like most enterprise users have been trying to do all along.
  Though I could be wrong, I don't have a windows computer around me to try it on at the moment. I moved my machines at home to different flavors of Linux when I didn't want to figure out comparability work around for 11
  
  I actually just deployed this out at my company and Windows App (or the non Windows Store Remote Desktop App) is required to access AVD and W365 devices. Windows RDP is still present and works for accessing domain joined Windows devices, and both Windows App and Remote Desktop have that functionality as well.

Good luck even opening it without signing in to a Microsoft account.
"Fuck you, sign in." -Microsoft

I knew I had remote desktop on my work laptop, because I had used it before, but the other day I was trying to open remote desktop and nothing came up, so I created an IT support ticket only for them to tell me it was now called Windows App...

This is funny and sad at the same time

This is some Twitter-tier rebranding failure.

I saw this on my work computer the other day and I couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was. This explains it. Wtf

Is this year of the Linux Desktop?
- No
- I'm morbidly curious where the line is for a global shift. So far it's invisible.
  
  I doubt it will even happen though. Microsoft's forcing AI on everything already and yet it hasn't moved the needle. Microsoft has to do some wilder shit to even move people to Linux. Influencers and awareness don't really help that much as shown by PewDiePie's video about him moving to Linux.

And on Windows they removed the functionality to remote into other machines.
Only business accounts for now.
But not for Android, iOS/MacOS.
Like whaaaaaat???
- So glad they got rid of the one thing 99.9% of people use it for! /s

Microsoft is fucking removed.
- thats a slur btw.
  
  They're the ones who chose the name "Microsoft."
  
  ...obviously. did the "fucking" give it away?
  
  it's okay trump won we get to have untermench
  
  No, it's a word that can be used as a slur. In this case I'm talking about a company.. hard to use a slur against a company.
  re·tard·ed /rəˈtärdəd/
  adjective adjective: removed
  less advanced in mental, physical, or social development than is usual for one's age.
  very foolish or stupid.

Are they doing this on purpose? Why would they even do something like that?

So frustrating. I've installed it on a few PCs to access remote desktop services and I can't figure out how. The old app says to use Windows app as it's going EoL. Ok. But how? Looks like it's meant to connect to windows 365 only .. or ik a total idiot.
- The old app borks the clipboard and the complete explorer on my system at work. It’s gone unfixed for like 2 years. And the windows app is not configured for our company yet, which means I can’t even use it.

gonna install my windows app on windows to remote into my windows and troubleshoot windows.

Probably another case of too many bean counters (and marketing majors), and not enough software developers. Windows hasn't innovated in forever. Seems like they're the Walmart of operating systems, just cheaper and easier for most people.

I really feel like Microsoft is on a quest to make windows as non user friendly as possible. Everything is hidden behind menus, the search function barely works, the taskbar can't be moved, they're constantly changing program names and can't forget cramming a useless chat bot into the os again. It's just a never ending stream of choices that make literally no sense from the perspective of the end user.
- Was Wheatley a criticism of systemic issues of upper management all along

Just the other day there was a post in a Linux memes com about how everything was called an app now.

Wait, are they doing a Boeing over there at Microsoft? Did they take all of the marketing people and put them in charge? Surely they had people that work there that saw this problem instantly but they were either ignored or they said nothing which says a lot about what they've got going on internally at Microsoft.
- I don't love the field, but a competent marketing department has no interest in creating confusing product names. Being easily found in a Google search is like the number 1 thing they care about.
  They'd be more likely to rename it something like "Remote Desktop: By Microsoft" or "CoPilot Remote". Something stupid, but recognizable.
- Wait, are they doing a Boeing over there at Microsoft?
  What, killing whistleblowers?
  
  Lol. Wouldn't shock me

These assholes are prepping up with a cloud service with a name change like that.

Bet: They will implement a chatbot using recall as Windows help, integrate it into something like Windows help and make a premium version of a stupid AI try to reverse engineering what you tried to do while guessing for Solutions neither the operator nor the ai understands. Is there a "remind me in 3 years"?

Try looking for anything related to "element" or "matrix"... Completely impossible
- "gimp, liquify plugin"
  dear god
- Sure, though at least it doesn't take too many words to clarify...
  windows app on the other hand..

Dealing with this shit at work right now because one of the vendors requires it. I have yet to run into someone in IT who knows wtf I'm talking about.
- I know it.
  I've got a bunch of AVD machines and the Windows app seems to be the best way to connect users to them.
  Although, in the last week, it's been freezing for some people and I have to switch them over to the web portal for a day or two. Still chasing that issue down.

People mock App as a Mac thing, iOS thing. But it was never part of the actual app name. Just a file extension.
- Well it’s short for Application. Which evolved from what we used to call a program.
  
  Of course it is. That’s not my point. My point was Microsoft is tasteless to include it in the app name.

Would recommend RustDesk instead.
- Yep, been using it for years now.
  Moved over from RealVNC due to licensing limitations and problems with speed and I've never looked back.

Yeah my dad's boss had this issue a couple weeks ago. His remote desktop app disappeared from his phone and he had no idea where. Figured out after looking for a whole day that they renamed it to this stupid bullshit.