The Windows Forecast is a look at the future of Windows that comments on the latest news for Windows Insiders, as well as other major announcements in the Windows space each and every week. My name is João Carrasqueira, and I've been covering the world of Windows professionally since 2018. If there's something you'd like to see covered, you can reach me at joao@xda-developers.com

The new year is now in full gear, and Windows development is back up and running. This week brought a few changes to various channels in the Windows Insider program, so let's break them down.

Microsoft is still working on cross-device experiences?

This one is actually kind of interesting

The Settings app in Windows has had an option for sharing content across devices ever since Windows 10, and that was because Microsoft was going all-in on the idea of continuity between Windows 10 Mobile and Windows 10 PCs, so you'd be using one app on the phone, and continuing the exact same task on your PC. At the time, it felt like it made total sense, but I never understood why that page remained available in Windows 11 after Windows phones just vanished.

As it turns out, this feature is still getting use in some way. This week's build for users in the Release Preview channel, specifically those running Windows 11 version 23H2, adds an interesting new feature that lets you continue editing OneDrive files after you've been working on them on your phone. Basically, if you're using the OneDrive app on your phone to edit something like a Word document and you open your PC within five minutes of using your phone, Windows will ask if you want to keep working on that file. This is actually pretty cool, and something that should honestly have been executed better back when Microsoft was pushing for Windows 10 PCs and phones to work together. Microsoft talked about that idea a lot, but it felt like there was never a true effort to make it work.

Funny enough, in the blog post where this was announced, Microsoft says you can change your cross-device in a page that doesn't actually exist. Somehow, I'm not entirely surprised.

Can widgets ever become useful?

Microsoft keeps trying, but is it really?

In a separate build, this time for users in the Beta channel of the Insider program, Microsoft also announced another change for Windows widgets. The company is making it easier for developers to show different kinds of content in their widgets by allowing a widget to pull any web content they want from a remote URL, rather than using the Adaptive Card format that Microsoft has been pushing for widget-like experiences.

It's very interesting to see Microsoft make these changes to widgets when I still feel like widgets never really lived up to their potential on Windows. To be perfectly frank, I never use widgets on my Mac Mini, either, but at least Apple has always put the effort in widgets feel native and you can even place them directly on the desktop now. Microsoft teased the possibility of desktop widgets a long time ago, but that still hasn't happened, and at this point, I don't know if it would matter. I do think the ability to pull HTML content from any URL could make widgets much more powerful, though I also worry that it could open the door to malicious content being served this way.

On a side note, if you read the development documentation for this new capability, it turns out this new feature is only available for users in the European Economic Area, possibly as part of the changes required by the Digital Markets Act. So it looks like Microsoft doesn't actually want to make widgets better in this way, it's just being forced to.

Brace yourself for Windows 11 version 24H2

It's coming to a PC near you soon

Finally, outside of the Windows Insider channels, Microsoft made a big announcement this week. The company has started automatically upgrading computers running Windows 11 version 22H2 and 23H2 to the latest release, version 24H2. The update was first made available in late 2024, but it was completely optional for eligible devices. Now, users will start being forced to upgrade.

This isn't entirely new for Microsoft, as new versions of Windows are forced onto users when the version they have installed is nearing the end of its support period. Since Windows 11 version 23H2 will be unsupported later this year for Home and Pro editions, those users are being forced to upgrade in order to keep receiving security updates as well.

Not that you should be afraid of Windows 11 version 24H2 anyway. For the most part, this has been a pretty solid update and it optimizes a lot of things to make PCs feel a little bit faster overall, especially if you have a Windows on Arm device. Something like a Surface Pro 9 with 5G or even a Surface Pro X could feel alot better to use with this new update, so it's more of a reason to be excited than concerned. You also don't have to worry if you hate any of the Copilot+ stuff, as that would only come with new hardware, and the update won't enable that for you if you don't want to see it for whatever reason.

Either way, this is a gradual rollout, so chances are you're not going to be forced to install the latest version of Windows 11 tomorrow. You should just be prepared because it will be happening over the next few months.

Here's hoping for more exciting announcements soon

That's not all that happened this week in the Windows world, of course, but it is all the most interesting stuff to look forward to. The Canary channel did get an easier way to enable the administrator protection feature I wrote about a while back, but otherwise, it's been pretty slow this past week. Even Patch Tuesday come and went with nearly nothing new mentioned. Hopefully things start to pick up more in the coming weeks.