The xbox apps They are a series of services that allow us to connect Windows with the Xbox Live cloud, as well as with the other Microsoft console services. These services allow us to do practically everything, from connecting with our friends, and playing with them, to unlocking achievements, managing the Microsoft console remotely and even playing games on it.
Benefits of maintaining UWP apps
As most of you probably already know first-hand and we have told you, when we do a clean installation of Windows, the system arrives with a series of pre-installed programs. Actually, by this we mean the uwp apps that Microsoft puts at our input disposal. It is true that they do not have much acceptance among users, applications among which we find the Xbox ones discussed.
However, despite their little success, the truth is that they present us with some interesting advantages that many do not take advantage of when they start working with a windows clean. For example, here we can highlight that it will not be necessary for us to install an external photo viewer, or a video player, or even an Internet browser or translation software. This means that we will actually have the possibility to start using and working with the new Windows-based computer from the first minute. Its use or not, will depend on the tastes or needs of each user.
These applications hardly take up any space on your hard drive, and they also do not consume PC performance. Therefore, unless we are obsessive with what we have installed or not on the PC, there are not many reasons to delete them.
But of course, we can come to the determination that, if we do not use these game services and we have the Microsoft console, it makes no sense for us to keep these applications installed. Not only because of the space they take up on the hard drive, but also because of maintaining a slightly cleaner operating system.
What we lose when deleting the apps
The first thing we lose when deleting these apps is the OS integration with the entire Xbox platform in the cloud. Among other functions, we will stop being able to chat with our friends, take game screenshots, record games and remote play, among other functions. However, if we don’t use any of these services and we don’t even have the console as such, and we enjoy the games, as we mentioned before, we can do without all of this.
The games that we can install from platforms like Steam will continue to work without problems. They may even do better by having more free resources after deleting these apps. However, the Microsoft Store games, especially those that are part of Xbox Play Anywhere, will not work because they cannot access the company’s services. This is something that we must keep in mind, and that is that many of the entertainment titles in the official Windows store focus on Xbox services. Therefore, if we have decided to eliminate these apps that we are talking about, we could have problems running them.
If we have Game Pass for PC, deleting these apps is the worst mistake we can make. Although, luckily, it is reversible.
Can we have problems?
Unlike many other bloatware apps that are installed by default on Windows, Xbox apps are highly integrated into the operating system. This means that, if we eliminate them, it is possible that we will have a problem, or error, except in the equipment. For example, it is easy that if we try to open any of these tools from a link we see a message that tells us that it is not available, or that it takes us to the store to download it again. Nothing serious, just some annoying notices.
Where we can have problems is when playing Microsoft games. Even if we have bought them in other stores, such as Steam. This is because these games (like Halo) make use of Microsoft services to allow users to connect to servers, play and participate online or access seasons.
As we will see later, these applications will reinstall themselves every time a new version of Windows is installed, and we can even install them by hand if needed. Therefore, if for now we do not want to have them, we can delete them without any problem, since the changes are totally reversible.
Delete Xbox apps
Depending on the version number of Windows 10 that our computer has, we will be able to uninstall the applications directly from the configuration options or using PowerShell if the first option is not available.
From Settings
To remove all Xbos applications from our computer, we must first access the Windows configuration options (Win + i). Next, click on Applications, then on Applications and features. In the Search, filter and sort… box, we introduce the term Xbox so that all the applications of this platform installed on the computer are displayed. Initially, 4 results should be displayed:
- Xbox
- Xbox Console Companion
- Xbox Game Bar
- Xbox Live
Of these 4 results, the only one that we cannot eliminate through the Windows graphical interface is the Xbox Game Bar. What we can do is deactivate it through the Windows configuration options by following the steps that we show you later.
To delete the rest of the applications, we just have to click on each one of them and select the button uninstall.
Once the installation has finished, if the computer does not invite us to restart the computer, it is advisable to do so so that Windows removes from the computer any traces that may be stored in memory during the process.
Take a look at the Start menu
Despite the controversy that this element has generated throughout the latest versions of Microsoft’s operating system, the Start menu is still key for many. Here we find a categorized list of all the software that we have installed on the computer and from which we can perform various actions. For example, we have the possibility of anchoring the titles that we want directly from here to the taskbar.
Obviously we can launch these software solutions from the Start menu itself and even uninstall everything that we do not want to continue installed on the computer. That is precisely what interests us in these same lines. By default, the different applications that we find in this section are distributed in alphabetical order.
This means that to uninstall the applications corresponding to Microsoft’s own Xbox console, we will have to go to the bottom of this Start menu that we are talking about. Here we are going to find the corresponding shortcuts that we have mentioned before and that Microsoft sends us by default in Windows.
Thus, to uninstall all of this once and for all from the operating system, all we have to do is click with the right mouse button on each of the entries. Here some options now appear and one of them is precisely the one called Uninstall. Therefore we only have to make use of this context menu option from the Start menu to eliminate all these applications that we tell you about.
Using PowerShell
To carry out this process we are going to need to resort to the well-known PowerShell commands that allow us to uninstall blocked apps from the operating system. The process is safe, so we don’t have to worry. Also, if we regret it, we will be able to easily recover these apps again.
The first thing we must do is open a PowerShell window with Administrator permissions. To do this, we click on the Windows search engine and look for this program, marking the option to run with Administrator permissions.
The first command we are going to execute is the following:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxApp | Remove-AppxPackage
This command will allow us remove the main Xbox app from Windows, with all its functions and all the processes running on the system because of it. In an instant, the app will be deleted from Windows, although it is not the only one installed on the system.
If we want to leave our Windows 10 or Windows 11 clean, we must also remove other apps related to Xbox services from our computer. For example, Game Overlay, Identify Provider, and Speech To Text Overlay. These apps are responsible for enabling certain Xbox Live services on Windows, such as the Game Bar or functions to check PC connectivity with console servers.
The commands that we must execute to eliminate these Windows services are:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Xbox.TCUI | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxGameOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxIdentityProvider | Remove-AppxPackage
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxSpeechToTextOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage
Each of them will be responsible for removing a different app from Windows. We can execute them in the order we want, since they don’t depend on each other and we won’t have any problems. What we do recommend is that if we delete one, we delete all of them, since we are not interested in having a half service or functionality.
When we finish deleting all the packages, we simply have to restart the computer. When it starts, as we can see, we will not have anything related to Xbox in our Windows. We can now use our PC normally, without bloatware bothering us.
We can now do a search in the Windows search engine to see that, indeed, there is nothing related to the Microsoft console.
And if we try to use any function, such as the Game Bar, we will be able to see an error that will indicate that the program is not installed, along with the possibility of searching for it within the Microsoft Store.
Reinstall Xbox apps
In case of repentance, the entire previous process is totally reversible. The only thing we have to do in this case is open the Microsoft Store and reinstall the apps from there that we find from Xbox.
In addition, Microsoft will reinstall all these apps every time we install a new version of the operating system, of which they are released every 6 months. Being native apps that are part of the Windows experience, the updates take the opportunity to install the new versions of these and, therefore, having deleted them, they will be installed again.
If we do not want to have these apps in Windows after updating, then what we should do is delete them after each update. We can create a PowerShell script with all the command lines that we have used to delete those applications, a script that we will have to execute every time Microsoft releases a large update since all the system applications that we have previously deleted will be installed again.
To create this script…
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