Major Windows 11 update, with taskbar tweaks and Android apps, coming in February

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will be tending to some of the unfinished parts of Windows 11 in an update next month, according to a blog post by Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. Foremost among the new features will be a public preview for Android apps running in Windows, a feature Microsoft promoted when it announced Windows 11 back in June 2021.

Microsoft also called out a few other areas of improvement in the post: redesigns for the Notepad and Media Player apps, taskbar improvements, a universal call mute and unmute button, "easier window sharing," and adding the weather directly to the taskbar instead of keeping it in a widget.

Most of these updates have already been available for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Dev channels for a while, so you can read our preview coverage (for Notepad, taskbar changes, and lots of miscellaneous bits and pieces) to get a good sense of what things will look like. It's possible that we'll see changes that Microsoft hasn't made public yet, but major changes are unlikely to skip the preview channels before being widely released.

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