Microsoft is about to disable advertising monetization platform for UWP applications

If you're a UWP app developer, this is definitely not happy news, and it may cause you to change the way your apps work.

Accordingly, on February 1, Microsoft has officially announced that it will close its Ad Monetization platform for UWP applications on June 1. As such, free applications that rely on advertising to maintain revenue will have to find a new ad network that is not Microsoft. All earnings from advertising activities from now until the end of May 31 will still be paid as usual.

Obviously, this decision will not affect current popular paid apps such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, iTunes, Slack, etc. simply because they do not rely on ads to maintain operations. However, free UWP applications will be in real trouble and forced to partially change the way it works. Microsoft's advertising monetization platform is primarily aimed at app developers, game studios, ad networks and marketing agencies who want to include and manage ads in their Windows applications.

This will be a blow to the "UWP isn't dead", which has been a hotly debated topic in technology forums for the past few years. In fact, over the years, Microsoft has been focusing less on its Universal Windows Platform, with an emphasis on innovation on Win32.

If you're a UWP app developer, you'll have until June 8 to download any of your data from the Ad Monetization platform. After that, all pages will be taken down simultaneously.