Windows 10 news recap: Build 14257, market share, stats

Welcome back to our weekly Windows 10 news recap, in which we recap the top news stories regarding Windows 10 for the week. Let’s dive straight in.

Windows 10 market share climbs to 11.85% as of January 2016

Windows 10 has been somewhat of a hit among consumers, with latest numbers claiming Windows 10 is now in use on over 11.85% of the total operating system market. At the beginning of 2016, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 10 had been installed on over 200 million devices worldwide.

This is definitely something to cheer about for the folks at Redmond as Windows 10 market share is continuously on the rise ever since its launch in July 2015. Microsoft is offering Windows 10 as a free upgrade for users running Windows 8 and Windows 7 for a year after which they’ll have to purchase it.

Windows 10 upgrade moves from optional to “recommended”

On the heels of market share statistics, the Redmond-giant this week moved Windows 10 over form being an optional update to a recommended one, which many are not happy with. A recommended update doesn’t necessarily mean the operating system will be installed automatically however.

While Windows Update will offer Windows 10 as a recommended upgrade, and go so far as to prep the upgrade for installation on machines with automatic updates turned on, users will still need to accept the upgrade before moving forward.

Windows 10 Redstone Insider Preview build 14257 released to the fast ring

Microsoft also released a new build of Windows 10 Redstone for Windows Insiders this week, but like the other builds so far, there were no new features of note. Microsoft is about ready to start implementing new features into the main development branch now however, so it shouldn’t be long before Insiders have new bits to play with.

This build contains mostly fixes and improvements on the back end and foundation of the operating system for upcoming new features, so don’t expect to see any visible changes just yet. Head over to Settings > Update & security to snag this release.

3 billion Windows Store visits and counting

Additionally, this week Microsoft announced that the Windows Store had seen over 3 billion visits since the launch of Windows 10 back in July 2015. That’s a huge number to be touting, and should help convince developers to start building apps for the platform.

Other factors that Microsoft focused on ranged from the broader ‘what kind of apps are people downloading from the store?’ with games coming out on top as about 32% of all downloads from October to December 2015.

That’s all for this week, what was your favorite story? Let us know below.