Major update to Windows 11 with taskbar tweaks and Android apps coming in February

Microsoft will be working on some unfinished parts of Windows 11 in an update next month, according to a blog post by Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. Primarily among the new features will be a public preview of Android apps running on Windows, a feature that Microsoft was pushing when it announced Windows 11 back in June 2021.

Microsoft also named several other areas of improvement in the post: a redesign of the Notepad and Media Player apps, improvements to the taskbar, a universal mute and unmute call button, “easier window sharing,”and adding weather directly to the taskbar instead of keeping it in a widget..

Most of these updates have been available to Windows Insiders on the Beta and Dev channels for some time now, so you can check out our preview (for Notepad, taskbar changes, and lots of miscellaneous snippets) to get a good idea of ​​what things are will look. It’s possible we’ll see changes that Microsoft hasn’t made public yet, but it’s unlikely that major changes will miss the preview channels before they’re widely released.

The updates that Microsoft has released since the release of Windows 11 in October collectively answer one question we asked in our review: do we need to wait for the new OS to fix the flaws in order to eliminate the once a year Windows service updates. Microsoft will likely roll out at least some major changes and new features to Windows 11 22H2 later this year, but the company is clearly taking a “when they’re ready”approach to updates to individual apps whose features are still in preview, oh than announced last summer. and minor functional improvements based on user feedback.

Microsoft didn’t specify the number of Windows 11 rollouts, but Panay said the Windows 11 upgrade proposal “is starting to enter its final availability phase, ahead of our original mid-2022 plan.”Microsoft first began the upgrade process from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on newer systems, which gave the company the opportunity to fix early issues (and there were many) before rolling out the OS to all PCs that meet strict system requirements. Windows 10 users can still easily delay upgrading to Windows 11 if they want to, but they will at least be offered the option to install the new OS via Windows Update soon if they haven’t already. (Manual installation is also possible and is the only way to install Windows 11 on a PC,