Tuesday, September 23rd 2025
Microsoft Claims 90% of Windows-on-Arm Usage Happens on Native Apps
Microsoft has published an interesting data point about the usage model of its Windows-on-Arm (WoA) devices. The company's corporate vice president Mike Adams claims that "The Arm app ecosystem continues to expand, with native Arm versions available for apps representing 90% of total user minutes, thus providing efficient, high-performance experiences across the scenarios that matter most to our customers." The Arm-based software ecosystem has matured to the point where the user experience is primarily occurring on native app builds, rather than relying on an x86-to-Arm translation layer. Microsoft is confident enough in this ecosystem's compatibility that it recommends users with older PCs running Windows 10—which will reach its end-of-life on October 14, 2025—consider transitioning to Arm-based Copilot+ AI PCs.
The company showcased various app use cases, all operating on their native build for Windows 11 on Arm. These include endpoint protection applications, VPN and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) apps, endpoint management tools, productivity and creative apps, as well as social, web, and entertainment applications. Microsoft even made a list of compatible applications, which you can check out here. For consumers, the choice of WoA laptops is limited, but we can expect more announcements from Qualcomm and NVIDIA to kickstart more design wins and shipments of Arm-based processors to the general Windows PC users.
Sources:
Windows Central, Microsoft
The company showcased various app use cases, all operating on their native build for Windows 11 on Arm. These include endpoint protection applications, VPN and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) apps, endpoint management tools, productivity and creative apps, as well as social, web, and entertainment applications. Microsoft even made a list of compatible applications, which you can check out here. For consumers, the choice of WoA laptops is limited, but we can expect more announcements from Qualcomm and NVIDIA to kickstart more design wins and shipments of Arm-based processors to the general Windows PC users.
32 Comments on Microsoft Claims 90% of Windows-on-Arm Usage Happens on Native Apps
And 0% of them require Copilot
100% of my apps are compiled for my cpu flags for years since 2006.
Emulation software may be the only exception like wine, dosbox, ... The emulator is compiled but the binary which is emulated is not native.
I do not see any point anymore in arm. RiscV with an open platform and bootloader or amd64 when it has to be the proprietary route.
Microsoft are desparate to address the large concerns of poor performance and incompatibility for windows on ARM with this.
All of that telemetry and tracking data is paying off for Microsoft.
:p
"See, Windows on ARM is useful for the populace!"
But there's a very important elephant in the room that Microsoft attempts to dodge here.
Related, copilot just appeared on my work PC taskbar this morning.
Is this guy just walking into the stall, looking the toilet square in the eye, and only hitting 90% of the time?
...Actually given some mens uh... streams, this may add up.
:)
Windows is spying. Microsoft is spying. And they're selling this information.
I bet 90% of what a user of a Windows on ARM device does on that device happens in the browser. The companies who buy these devices expect the users will use them with Teams, Office, and the M365 stuff which runs on anything (also in the browser). MS themselves have a lot of these devices, probably enough to skew the statistic even.
In their "what works where" site they proudly list 1600 games but when you filter for playable/perfect you end up with 120ish. And at least one random app that I searched for which is marked as "Compatible" has an atrocious performance on the top end ARM device on which I saw it being tested.
So 90% browser and 10% "technically compatible but the lawyers told us to not say more".
The vast majority of Windows-on-ARM devices are corporate/work issued devices, so people are using them for the standard productivity tasks: e-mail, web browser, office suite, etc. If there are other tools required by the company to do the job, the IT department has qualified those applications to run on these systems.
I can understand installing MS apps like word on an arm based device...but as far as I know you cannot install windows 11 on just about any arm based device, its all Android.
Yeah, I have no doubt the tracking in W11 and apps like Office and Teams is very much aimed at the corporate overlord. Why manage people personally when you can get the usage metrics reports from MS and determine who is working, how much, and from where? I don’t doubt all those things are possible and happening. I used to get emails (that would light up my phone at 4AM) from MS on who I “collaborated most with,” so you know the tracking runs deep.
If we talk about that subject, one giant reset is needed anyway.Exactly. But Microsoft is fine with dooming Windows existence and moving to browser / cloud. They basically migrated all their key offerings to fully cloud and browser-first platform, Windows is relic on life support.
And I think we can all agree it will end badly for Microsoft long-term. Yet, shareholders are now happy, and that is only thing that matters...
Microsoft basically lost relevance as a consumer platform when they fumbled away and ultimately exited the smartphone market. Smartphones have been the primary driver of consumer technology innovation for over ten years and Microsoft is just a sideline spectator today.
Personal computers are the old paradigm.
Their best hope is to maintain some consumer relevance via Xbox but the truth is in 15-20 years they will just be the cloud IT dweeb for the enterprise world. Joe Consumer might still be tapping on some on some Microsoft device but their attention will mostly revolve around their phone connected some AI cloud compute service.
Microsoft will soon just be enterprise’s IT department in the cloud.