Microsoft will double the number of advertisements shown in the Windows 10 start menu. Instead of displaying 5 'Promoted Apps' tiles in the start menu, the company's latest OS will soon start to show 10 of the 'Promoted Apps' tiles. The information appeared in slides (PDF) from Microsoft's developers conference Winhec.
These so-called promoted apps are Windows Store apps of which currently 3 of the 5 tiles are links to apps in the Windows Store. The other 2 are Windows Store apps that were previously installed by Windows 10. According to the slides, the promoted apps have as goal, "To introduce users & expose them to the Windows Store". They are also changed regularly and picked on a "per-geography basis".
To provide some space to the new number of promoted apps, Microsoft will limit the number of links to installed apps from 17 to 12, according to the slides.
The changes will come with Microsoft's anniversary update and it's unclear whether only new installations will see the increased number of promoted apps, or that also existing Windows 10 will see them.
Enterprise users can set a group policy to disable promoted apps and it will still be possible to manually remove each tile from the start menu. However double the number of tiles, means double the amount of work.
