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AP Photo/Richard Drew
# tight space
Windows 10 is planning to pack your Start menu with more ads
The number of promoted apps on your menu will increase from five to ten.
FOR THOSE OF you who upgraded to Windows 10 in the last few months, you may have noticed how the start button screen is filled with apps you’ve chosen and promoted apps.
The latter is a way for new and popular apps to be promoted and for Microsoft to help app downloads.
The number of apps promoted was limited to five – two apps like Candy Crush Saga or Microsoft’s Solitaire collection are already downloaded while the other three are links to the store – but with the Anniversary edition coming up later this summer, this number will be increased to ten.
In slides seen by NeoWin, not only will this number increase but the number of static apps (stock apps that are there by default) will decrease from 17 to 12.
The Anniversary update of Windows 10 will arrive a year after Windows 10 first launched back at the end of July 2015.
The update will bring extensions for Microsoft’s browser Edge, a dark theme, redesigned Start menu, fingerprint authentication for apps and websites, and Windows Ink, a way to draw and annotate anything that’s on screen.
Those using Windows 7 and 8.1 still have another two months to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, and more than 300 million people are using it.
Despite that, Microsoft has been criticised for the way in which it’s been pushing people to upgrade, even going as far as to automatically schedule a time to update but requiring you to click a link to reschedule or cancel it.
If they don’t before 29 July (or they can’t because they’re using an older version), they will have to pay €119 to upgrade to the basic Home version and stay up to date.
