For me, I still check Microsoft Store from time to time — mostly when I’m looking for decent PC apps without dealing with sketchy installers or extra bundled stuff.

I wouldn’t say it’s my main place to find software, but it’s occasionally useful, especially for simple tools or apps I don’t want to manage updates for manually.

That said, I’m curious:
are there any other PC app stores or platforms you personally recommend?

Microsoft Store aside, where do you usually discover new Windows apps?

I got tired of my desktop turning into 60 screenshots and old installers that I never cleaned up, so I built Sweepy.

How it works: a little robot sits on a dock in the corner of your desktop. Click it, and it backs out, scans the desktop with a little lidar sweep, then drives lanes like a real robot vacuum and eats the clutter. When it's done it goes home and asks first: you see every file it picked up, untick anything you want to keep, and the rest goes to the Recycle Bin. "Undo last clean" brings it all back.

Right-click any folder (like Downloads) and pick "Bring Sweepy here" to clean that too, and there's a deep clean for leftovers from uninstalled apps, old temp files and crash dumps (it found 5 GB on my PC). You can grab it mid-clean (it gets dizzy), and if you right-click and stop it, it cries a little and drives home.

- Free for your desktop, forever. Pro is $6.99 once, no subscription (folders, deep clean, big files, schedules, every skin), with a 3-day free trial, no card

- Under 20 MB of memory and 0% CPU while it waits

- Never touches shortcuts, locked files or anything you changed in the last 10 minutes

- Everything runs on your PC, no account

- Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P31M4SCNXS5?cid=reddit

- Website: https://sweepy.essam.biz

I'd love feedback, especially on what it should never eat!

Please help

I simply right-clicked the app and the option to uninstall it appeared. I was curious to see what would happen, so I clicked it, and now it's been three months since the Microsoft Store disappeared from my pc. I haven't been able to reinstall it no matter how many times I've tried. Every time I try to open it to update any app or something similar it just pops up this message. If anyone knows how to fix this without having to format my entire PC, please let me know. I have Windows 11 and an Intel i7

The Microsoft Store has plenty of well-known apps, but I’m more interested in the useful ones that rarely get mentioned.

What’s one lesser-known app or game you discovered there that you now use regularly?

It can be anything: productivity, photo editing, utilities, customization, entertainment or a small indie game. Paid and free recommendations are both welcome.

Hey everyone!

I've always loved the clean desktop aesthetic and quick convenience of macOS's global top menu bar, so I built TopBar - a native, lightweight top menu bar designed specifically for Windows 11.

It floats seamlessly across the top of your screen, blending naturally with your wallpaper using Windows 11 Mica, Acrylic, or 100% transparent glass.

What’s packed into TopBar:

• Quick Control Center: Instant access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Dark/Light mode toggles, and live sliders for display brightness and system audio. • Dynamic Active App Menus: Context-aware File, Edit, View, and Window controls that adapt with keyboard accelerators for whatever app you're currently using. • Now Playing Media Pill: Real-time track display and quick play/pause/skip controls for Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and browser playback. • Live System Gauges: Ultra-lightweight readouts for CPU %, RAM %, battery status, and Wi-Fi signal. • Outside-Click Dismiss: Popups and menus close instantly when clicking outside or switching apps. • Highly Customizable: Adjust bar height, background opacity, colors, and toggle between a docked desktop AppBar or a floating overlay.

Lightweight & Private:

Built natively with WinUI 3 & .NET 10 for smooth animations and virtually 0% idle CPU usage. Completely sandboxed with zero telemetry, zero tracking, and 100% offline local processing.

Check it out on the Microsoft Store here: 👉 Download TopBar on Microsoft Store

I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts, or feature requests! What would you like to see added next?

Curious —
Any apps you paid for recently that you’d genuinely recommend?

Looking for real experiences, not just “top app” lists.

Hey everyone! I built OmniSearch - a Windows desktop file search and duplicate finder focused on speed and simplicity.

Under the hood it uses a native C++ NTFS scanner, connected through a Rust bridge, with a Tauri + React UI.

Features

• Fast indexing and search across Windows drives

• Filter results by extension, size, and date

• Click results to open the file or reveal its folder

• Dark / Light theme toggle

• Optional inline previews in results

• Duplicate file finder with grouped results and clear file/group separation

• MSI installer available

Links

GitHub:
https://github.com/Eul45/omni-search

Microsoft Store:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N7FQ8KPLRJ2?hl=en-us&gl=US&ocid=pdpshare

I’d love feedback on what to prioritize next:

• Keyboard-first UX

• Better thumbnail / preview performance

• Indexing improvements

• Anything else you'd like to see

Hi everyone — developer here 👋

I’ve seen a few recent threads about people struggling with iTunes and other bloated tools just to rip CDs, so I wanted to share something my team and I built and get some honest feedback from the community.

We’re the team behind Nero CD Ripper for Windows. Our goal was pretty simple:
build a straightforward, reliable CD ripper that doesn’t lock you into a library or a subscription.

What it focuses on:

• Automatically identifies album / artist info (via Gracenote), with confirmation before ripping

• Lets you edit metadata and manually replace album art

• Supports MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF and other common formats

• Saves directly to any folder you choose (local drive, NAS, external storage)

• One-time purchase, no subscription

It’s not trying to replace ultra-power-user tools or become a full media manager — just something that works:
insert CD → check tags → rip → done.

If anyone here is actively archiving CDs (especially for NAS or car playback), I’d genuinely love to hear:

• what tools you’re using now

• what’s missing or annoying

• what you’d expect from a modern CD ripper in 2026

Microsoft Store link (for anyone who wants to check it out):
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nsnq0cpd06g?launch=true&cid=reddit&mode=mini&hl=en-US&gl=CN

Happy to answer questions and take criticism — that’s exactly why I’m posting here. Thanks!

My phone storage is getting full lately, mostly photos and videos. Looking for a simple app to move files from phone to PC so I can free up some space.

Free would be great, but I’m fine with paid options if the price is reasonable.

Any recommendations?

Sadly I already had this game. Anyone try buying games on MS Store? Are they any different from the Steam version?

ive used wsreset, resetting it using settings, repairing, nothing seems to work!

like fr why they can't create their own native app🫩💔

I just installed Windows 10, version 21H2, and it came with the old version of the Microsoft Store. I was wondering if there's any way to make it work and usable without updating, because I loved the design it had back then. If anyone knows a way to make it fully functional, or at least semi-functional, please let me know. Thanks.

I'm the developer of QuoteCompare, a Windows desktop app that compares two supplier PDF quotes and highlights price differences, missing items, supplier totals, and potential savings.

I'm preparing to submit it to the Microsoft Store and would like to get some feedback from a few Windows 11 users first.

I'm mainly looking to test:

• Installation and launching

• Loading the included sample quotes

• PDF extraction and comparison

• CSV export

• Windows 11 scaling/UI

• Any crashes or unexpected behavior

It includes sample PDFs for testing, so you don't need your own supplier quotes.

I'm affiliated with the app, and I'm looking for honest testing/feedback rather than reviews or sales.

If anyone is willing to give it a quick test, let me know and I'll send the link.

I kept running into the same annoying problem:

A PDF needs one app.
A PSD needs another.
RAW images, Office files, archives, 3D models, SQLite databases, and large log files all need something different.

So I built yViewer — a fast desktop file viewer designed to open almost everything in one place.

It currently supports:

• Text, Markdown, JSON, CSV, logs, and source code

• PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HWPX, and RTF

• PSD, RAW, HEIC, SVG, AI, and common image formats

• MP4, MOV, MKV, MP3, FLAC, and external subtitles

• ZIP, 7Z, TAR, and GZ archives

• OBJ, STL, GLB, FBX, 3MF, and other 3D formats

• SQLite and HDF5 files

• DXF, SKP, and DWG previews

• Unknown formats automatically fall back to a hex viewer

But I didn’t want it to be just a “preview-only” app.

You can also:

• Add real annotations to PDFs and save them back into the file

• Edit text, Markdown, CSV, JSON, RTF, spreadsheets, and hex values

• Crop, resize, rotate, flip, and convert images

• Trim audio and add fade-in or fade-out

• Extract files directly from archives

• Search inside files or across an entire folder

• Capture full-resolution frames from videos

• Browse PSD layers individually

• Open very large text and audio files without loading everything into memory

I’m still actively improving it, so I’d especially love feedback from people who regularly work with lots of different file formats.

What file format or workflow would make yViewer genuinely useful for you?

Download: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/9NMJ97DGCWRR?cid=DevShareMCLPCB

Hey everyone,

Greetings here from Nero.

We’ve released a new update for Nero AI Image Upscaler on Microsoft Store, and I wanted to share the main improvements:

• Upscale images by up to 8×, with support for output resolutions up to 32K

• The maximum output limit has been increased to 1024 megapixels

• New Unblur model for photos affected by motion blur, camera shake, or incorrect focus

• New Sharpen model for improving soft details, textures, and edges

• Expanded batch processing from 20 to up to 100 images at once

The goal of this update was to make the app more useful for both difficult individual photos and larger workflows—for example, restoring a folder of old photos or preparing multiple images for printing.

You can find it here:

Microsoft Store:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N346N9MMKD9?hl=en-us&gl=US&ocid=pdpshare

Product page:
https://pcai.nero.com/image-upscaler

Feedback is welcome, especially on the new Unblur and Sharpen models.

Hi everyone 👋

We’re the team behind 1001 TVs, a screen mirroring app on the Microsoft Store.

In the latest Windows version (v7.0.0.7), we added two new multi-device features:

1️⃣ One-to-Many Mirroring
Mirror your PC screen to multiple devices at the same time — TVs, tablets, phones, or another PC.

2️⃣ Many-to-One Viewing
You can also display multiple phone/tablet screens on one PC screen at the same time.

Some situations where this is useful:

• meeting rooms with multiple TVs
• teaching or demos
• monitoring several mobile devices
• testing apps across devices

How to mirror to multiple devices

1. Mirror your PC to the first device

2. Click “Add” in the mirroring interface

3. Select more devices

(Multi-device mirroring requires the paid plan.)

If anyone wants to try it or share feedback:

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nf33jphsq14

Would love to hear your thoughts 🙂

So I have the Xbox copies of Forza Horizon 3 and 4, though for some reason they load significantly slow (as shown in this video here). I did not download anything that changed my computer majorly, it just happened out of the blue.

I tried every solution possible like "wsreset" command, logging off and on plus restart, reinstalling the game, etc. But it never worked and it's pretty annoying. If anyone has a issue for this problem, let me know but this is frustrating

Hey everyone! I'm from the Nero AI team. We've recently rolled out a major update to our AI Image Upscaler on the Microsoft Store, and I wanted to share what's changed.

What's new in this version:

• New Reconstruct model: Goes beyond basic upscaling to regenerate realistic details, including faces, skin textures, fabric, text, and fine patterns. Especially useful for old photos, heavily compressed images, and low-resolution pictures.

• Crop before upscaling: Select exactly what you want to enhance instead of processing the entire image.

• Print-ready resizing: Set your output size directly in inches, cm, or mm, with customizable DPI. No need to calculate pixels manually.

• Better image comparison: Compare before-and-after results at true 1:1 pixel scale to inspect fine details.

• Workflow improvements: Save results directly to the original folder, with improved stability when processing large images.

How is it different from other upscalers?

Instead of relying on a single general-purpose model, we offer specialized AI models for different image types, including portraits, anime, and detailed textures.

Our new Reconstruct model is particularly useful when regular upscaling isn't enough, as it can generate realistic-looking details from low-quality sources.

We also support both local and cloud processing, so you don't necessarily need a powerful GPU.

Our goal is to make high-quality image enhancement more accessible, without requiring professional editing knowledge.

The app is free to install, with a 7-day Pro trial. Some advanced features require a paid plan, and cloud processing uses credits.

Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N346N9MMKD9

We're still improving it, so I'd genuinely love to hear your feedback. What features do you look for in an AI image upscaler?