Hosted App Model, a Great Feature of Windows 10 2004

This guide provides a practical overview of Hosted App Model, a Great Feature of Windows 10 2004, including its main features, benefits, limitations, and important considerations.

In the Hosted App Model, an application can declare itself as the host for other applications, while also allowing those apps to retain their identities as standalone applications.

For example, a script file when hosted by a server (Powershell or Python) can be considered by Windows 10 as a full application with its own icons, shortcuts in Task Mannager and Task Switcher. Besides, it can also be installed and uninstalled using standard Windows 10 method.

For this to happen, the server application only needs to declare the ability to be a host in its manifest and the hosted application will need to declare its dependencies on the server application.

So far, we've mainly seen this feature be used for Progressive Web Apps, where the server that hosted the app would be the Chrome browser. But Windows only considers these applications as regular applications.

However, it is expected that Hosted App Model will take advantage of its effects on the new Your Phone application.

Specifically, the Your Phone application will act as a storage server and create Hosted Apps that are essentially pointing to applications being streamed from your smartphone to your computer. This lets you pin apps on your smartphone to the Task Bar or Start Menu.

The Hosted App Model also blurs the lines between apps on your device and apps running from the cloud storage. Every type of application doesn't make any difference anymore.

It is reported that Microsoft will be using the Hosted App Model to safely run Win32 applications on Windows 10X. Besides, Hosted App Model is also used to provide applications from the cloud storage for users.

You can imagine an Android application in the cloud storage that can be delivered to a Windows tablet in the same way that Your Phone works but does not need to be connected to the same network. In addition, games transmitted from the cloud storage can be played smoothly just like games installed on the computer, eliminating concerns about storage capacity and hardware power.