Windows 11’s native app era is coming back after years of web app slop, and Microsoft is finally building it in public

The major benefit is that WinUI’s renewed focus will eventually reduce the web app problem that Windows has developed over these years. Not only third-party developers, but Microsoft also stopped using WinUI in favor of WebView2, which is powered by Microsoft Edge (a Chromium fork).

However, nobody can confirm that WinUI’s renewed efforts would convince different product groups at Microsoft to invest in the native framework, so don’t be surprised if New Outlook and Teams remain web crap for months or years.

Microsoft also promised to make WinUI faster and use less RAM

Now, replacing web apps with WinUI alone is not enough, as WinUI itself has performance concerns that need to be addressed first, and Microsoft is fully aware of them.

Speaking at Build 2026, Chris Anderson, who is better known for his contributions to the desktop GUI stack for Windows, said Microsoft’s most important priority is to focus on “performance, fundamentals, quality, fixing a lot of bugs,” and added that the company has “invested heavily in really improving memory usage.”

One of the recent changes was moving WinUI processes to a system compositor, “which should yield some even better performance improvements.”

Microsoft did not clarify how things would look after these improvements roll out, so we don’t have a number, and I can’t tell you whether a WinUI app that used 300MB of RAM will now drop to 200MB, but you can expect better resource management.

“I want to talk about the stuff that we need to get going so that we can earn the right to build some of these things. And these are really the core features that people have been asking for and really need to be productive on top of WinUI. The first and foremost is performance, fundamentals, quality, fixing a lot of bugs,” Anderson said during the Build 2026 developer conference.

Here’s a clip from his session:

Moving WinUI development into the open is the first big step in that direction. Not only does it give us more transparency into the features or performance benefits coming to WinUI, but it also brings the broader developer community closer to Microsoft.

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