Windows Insiders on the Fast ring who installed build 17110 this week got a nasty—or welcome—surprise: The Microsoft Store app is missing.

Depending on your perspective, this is either a huge and obvious problem or a hopefully peek at what Windows 10 would be like today if Microsoft hadn’t gone down its disastrous mobile path. But either way, it’s just a bug in a pre-release version of Windows 10 and nothing to get too excited about.

Also, there’s a fix.

“We launched build 17110 and have received a quick influx of feedback regarding the Microsoft Store application not functioning as expected,” Microsoft’s Jason Howard writes in a Microsoft support forum post. “There are several experiences being reported, [including] pinned tiles missing on Start, [a] missing pin from taskbar, [the] application not showing in [the] ‘All Apps’ list [in] Start, [and the app being] missing from Settings > Apps & features.”

In other words, the Microsoft Store app is gone.

Howard says that Insiders should not try to reset the Store app because that will actually remove it permanently. But he does provide the following workaround, which is apparently not “official” but does appear to solve the problem:

• Reboot the PC.
• Open Powershell with Administrator permissions.
• Paste in the following command:
  Get-AppXPackage WindowsStore -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)AppXManifest.xml”}
• Reboot the PC.

Voila! The Microsoft Store app should now appear and work normally. Obviously, this will be fixed in time for the next Insider build, which could happen as soon as the end of this week.

Tagged with Windows 10 Insider Preview