At the end of last month, Microsoft officially announced Windows 11 25H2 which is now entering public testing phase via the Insider program for Dev and Beta channels (build 26200.5670 for Dev and build 26120.4520 for Beta).
As such upcoming Windows 11 version 25H2 features will now be available for testing and one of those happens to be a new Group policy addition that will allow users to remove several default Microsoft Store apps that come bundled with the OS.
Some of these applications are often regarded as "bloatware" by users and that is why they often opt for bloatware-removal third-party tools and why users long for a bloat-free Windows; perhaps Windows 11 25H2 will be it?
Previously, users could uninstall such apps by using PowerShell or other CLI tools but adding it to the Group Policy and making it simpler to do via a GUI is a nice touch.
The new Group Policy setting is called "Remove default Microsoft Store packages from the system" and it allows users to select or deselect certain apps from the list of available ones to uninstall from your setup.
The description of this new setting says
If you enable this policy, the selected Microsoft Store apps in the provided list will be uninstalled from the system. You can make adjustment to the default settings.
Unselected apps in the list will not be removed.
Default is 'disabled'.
If the policy is disabled or not configured, no Microsoft default Store packages will be removed from the system.
Thus it looks like users and admins alike will be able to uninstall the apps they don't want on their system, although by default, no inbox apps will be removed. The list of apps includes Clipchamp, Windows Media Player, Terminal, Notepad, and more, as you can see in the image below:
Upon the enablement of default app removal via the new Policy setting, the following Registry key is created:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Appx\RemoveDefaultMicrosoftStorePackages
and each of the subkeys is for the corresponding Microsoft app. However, this also means that Windows Home edition users won't have this as Group Policy editor is only available on Pro.
Via: Patch My PC
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