Microsoft's plan for the new year 2022 should be to fix the Xbox app on PC

Over the past couple of years, Microsoft's industry-dominated Xbox Game Pass has given the Xbox platform a huge advantage, attracting tons of users into the Xbox ecosystem with a huge library of games that you can access at a reasonable monthly cost. As part of the company's effort to branch directly into the PC gaming space, Microsoft has also launched PC Game Pass, a PC version of Game Pass that offers the same benefits to people who prefer playing games on a Windows PC.

Unfortunately, unlike the user experience of Xbox Game Pass via console, the PC Game Pass experience has also been very disappointing for some time. Where PC Game Pass wasn't good enough, users had to deal with UWP app delivery issues that frequently disrupted game installations, relying on the sluggish and slick Windows 10 version of the Microsoft Store, and Xbox app that wasn't much better off, and very poor support.

But with the arrival of Windows 11 starting to fix a lot of these issues, Microsoft made the wise decision to move everything to the Xbox app on PC rather than split the PC Game Pass experience between it and the Microsoft Store. Despite this, there's still one big flaw Microsoft hasn't addressed: the quality of the Xbox app on PC.

Apparently, the biggest problem with the Xbox app is that it's often incredibly slow to respond and buggy in use. It was better than the Microsoft Store was in Windows 10, but it's still far from being in acceptable condition. The service's Install or Update Games buttons often become unresponsive, forcing some users to restart the app. Sometimes the image of video game tiles won't load on the storefront at all, making it impossible to see and look at the games. The app didn't even show any option to update games despite the developer releasing a patch, preventing access to official bugfixes (this could prevent multiplayer games altogether).