Microsoft finds targeting issue with stock Windows 10 app flights for Insiders, issues correction

A couple of weeks ago, the Windows Insider team decided to pause app updates for Windows 10 native apps for Windows Insiders in the Fast and Slow Rings. As the team explained, this was intended to improve the quality of inbox apps that will ship with the Fall Creators Update in September.

While this decision is understandable, the situation remained a bit confusing for Insiders who recently saw some features disappear and then come back with app updates over the past few days. According to Windows Insider Chief Dona Sarkar, this is all because a targeting issue caused Fast and Slow Ring Insiders to receive updates for the Photos, Groove Music, Movies and TV and Paint 3D apps by mistake. Sarkar shared more details about what happened in the Feedback Hub today.

#WindowsInsiders: we found an issue with our app flighting capabilities and have now fixed it: https://t.co/526VQ0fxFi

— Dona Sarkar (@donasarkar) August 3, 2017

“Because it is critical that Insiders are experiencing the same versions of the inbox apps that will be released as the default for all Windows customers when we release the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, we are releasing updates to the inbox apps that restores them to what they were previously,” explained Sarkar.” This means that Insiders may notice some new features and capabilities disappear again temporarily until we officially resume flighting app updates to the Fast and Slow rings.”

Sarkar said that all Windows 10 stocks apps should be affected by this change and receive updates to bring back things as they were. Here is what you can expect:

• For Photos, Insiders will notice the loss of features like video editing and search.
• For Groove Music, Insiders may notice the loss of the Top Music Video Gallery and Mini-View features. If you are signed in and have more than 100 local playlists, playlists beyond 100 will be lost. Any playlist that has been created and not synced to the cloud will be lost.  All music will need to be re-grovelled and re-matched, a process that could take up to an hour depending on collection size.
• For the Movies & TV app, Insiders may notice a loss of some UX improvements such as spacing reduction, scrolling headers, and other usability improvements as well as better support for personal videos on SD cards, share functionality from trailer browse, and defaulting to maximized full screen for video playback. Any purchases will need to re-synced to your PC. Uncompleted downloaded rentals will need to be manually executed via File Explorer (they’ll show as expired within Movies & TV).
• For Paint 3D, Insiders will notice the loss of Line and Curve and ability to Save/Load .glB files as well as some other smaller UX changes. Insiders will be unable to open any saved projects created while they had the newer build of Paint 3D.

This shouldn’t affect Fast Ring Insiders who recently chose to “skip ahead,” and as a result opted in to receive Redstone 4 builds as well as app updates for Windows 10 stock apps. As for Windows Insiders on the Release Preview Ring, they should also keep receiving updates as usual.