I wish UWP had succeeded
I work professionally as a C++ developer, and as part of my job I personally ported multiple Win32 games to run on UWP for Desktop and Xbox. I will admit, there are some aspects of the Universal Windows Platform that I found annoying, but overall I liked the direction it was going and the features it offered. The main thing I liked about UWP apps was the user experience: the app/game runs in a sandbox with limited permissions that the user can see in advance and even turn off or customize. I am a huge, huge advocate of giving users control over what apps are allowed to do on their system. This is difficult to do with any real reliability for Win32 apps, especially without sacrificing performance, and it's why antivirus software has stepped up as an alternative. UWP on the other hand had sandboxing and permissions baked in while being really performant, especially if you implemented your UWP app or game as C++/WinRT with DirectX 11 or 12. Android, iOS, and other mobile operating sys