At Build 2023, Microsoft announced Dev Home, a new Windows 11 app for developers that promised a central location for various developer-related features and settings. During the next year and a half, Microsoft released several Dev Home updates with new features and improvements, but the app has never left its preview state. Now, Microsoft is killing it.
Microsoft has not made any announcements yet, but users discovered a discontinuation message inside the app's code. It says, "Dev Home will be going away in May 2025 and a subset of its features will be moved to new places." Microsoft promises to release more information about the end of Dev Home in the coming months.
Microsoft Dev Home app/platform is dead. EOL is set for May 2025.https://t.co/8S0Qbrf3Bk pic.twitter.com/axLNmAm4N5
— Rafael Rivera (@WithinRafael) January 27, 2025
While Dev Home has some interesting features, like the ability to connect to GitHub repositories and monitor your system's resources with special widgets (Dev Home lets you pin CPU/RAM/network usage to Windows widgets), it mostly worked as a shortcut to various developer-related Windows settings. However, at some point, Microsoft wanted to implement "Advanced Windows settings" in Dev Home to allow users and developers to easily tweak settings that usually require adjusting the system registry or other not-so-accessible settings. Sadly, those plans never materialized.
The idea of having a single power app for developers sounds good, but Microsoft failed to make Dev Home truly useful. Developers on Reddit and other social media generally agree that Dev Home provides little to no benefit to their workflows, and its demise is unlikely to make any of them very sad. However, some are probably going to miss resource consumption widgets—they were pretty useful.
What do you think about the end of the Dev Home app?
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