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Dev confirms Defender Remover was indeed breaking UWP apps on Windows 11

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Unofficial third-party Windows tools and utilities are pretty popular among Windows enthusiasts. However, these tools can often break certain aspects of the OS. Recently, a popular Windows 11 debloater app was found to be causing conflicts with the operating system. Although the issues were seemingly fixed, the app has been banned from the Microsoft Store which led the developer of the app to call it "a tragedy".

In a somewhat similar situation, developer of another third-party application, Defender Remover, has confirmed that their app was indeed causing issues with Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Good thing, though, is that the issue has been resolved in the latest version, 12.4.1. They write:

- update: this uwp issue is caused by unregistering classes of windows smart screen, so that is needed for uwp functionality (sometimes). The class which i'm talking about is SmartScreen Settings Checker. The next version of Defender Remover will not unregister SmartScreen anymore.

- fixed in 12.4.1

You can view the full changelog below:

  • fixed issues with uwp apps specified in #38 .
  • fixed some tracing removal of defender specified in #4 (in Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 11 Dev Channel, only)
  • improvements in performance

In case you want to learn more or download the app, you can do so from Neowin or from its GitHub page.

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