Intel’s AppUp Center is shutting down on March 11th, 2014 and some apps downloaded from the company’s app store for Windows will stop working May 15th, 2015. This probably won’t affect you since you probably didn’t even realize Intel had an app store… which is likely a big part of the reason Intel is pulling the plug.

Intel AppUp Center

A few years ago, the AppUp Center might have seemed like a good idea. Microsoft hadn’t yet launched a Windows Store for PC apps, but Intel looked around and saw Apple, Google, and other companies having a lot of success by offering users a single, simple place to find and download apps.

So Intel launched the AppUp Center with a focus on computers featuring low-power Intel Atom processors. But there wasn’t much you could find in the store that wasn’t readily available outside the store.

Over the next few years Intel continued to build the AppUp Center with support for Windows XP through Windows 8, but the company didn’t really push the platform very hard as the netbook market faded, Intel started to push higher-priced ultrabooks, and Microsoft launched its own app store with Windows 8.

If you did download and install apps from the AppUp Center, you’ll need to keep it installed on your PC to continue using those apps. And if you have software that needs to communicate with Intel’s servers to function properly, those apps might not work after May 15th, 2015.

The good news is that Intel will refund you for money you spent on apps if you apply for the refund before December 19th, 2014.

You can find more details in the Intel AppUp FAQ.

via TechCrunch

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4 replies on “Intel’s app store closes in March (Related: Intel had an app store)”

  1. I think I got angry birds from there like three years ago or something.lol

  2. I can see why Intel will close the AppUp. I have not heard of it. I think what hurt netbooks is that Win 7 was more than most netbooks could handle. The perfect netbook operating system was – IMO – Win XP. It is a shame Intel did not get Microsoft to create a Win XP OS that one could use with netbooks instead of Microsoft forcing every one who has a netbook to use Win 7 limited (not suitable for many netbooks – IMO [I have one and it is slow]). I am hoping to install ReactOS onto the netbook I have once I can install it from an USB CD / DVD drive. https://www.reactos.org

    1. Uh, plenty of people installed XP on their netbooks… there wasn’t a need to get a special version… but Windows 7 didn’t hurt netbooks, dual cores had quickly become common and that was enough, along with 2GB of RAM, to run Windows 7 just as well as XP with 1GB of RAM…

      Netbook market problem was that the hardware hardly improved in years, Intel had the ATOM on a long 5 year product cycle, MS still forced selling of netbooks with only 1GB of RAM with Windows 7 Starter Edition and that meant a lot of people had to upgrade the RAM as soon as they got the system, and the push to make them thinner and lighter also started to make them harder to upgrade as some even removed the RAM access panel and people had to choose to void warranty to open up the system to upgrade the RAM…

      It also didn’t help that they had started to become pretty generic as designs varied very little and without significant improvements people had no reason to replace the netbooks they already had… and eventually that performance became too low as mobile devices finally started to provide rival performance and longer run times…

      So, really, netbooks died out because of stagnation…

      While ReacOS has been in alpha for over a decade as they started in 1998 and is a offshoot of a previous attempt to clone Win95…

      So, I wouldn’t count on it being useful any time soon… better off trying out a GNU/Linux distro instead… Many still have dedicated forums to specific netbook models…

      1. I agree. Lubuntu (a light version of Ubuntu) runs exceptionally well on low end hardward. The desktop is similar to Windows XP and 1 GB of RAM is adequate. The only thing to worry about it, is check to make sure your graphics chip is supported. Intel used a graphics chip on some netbooks that is not well supported on most Linux distros.

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