Windows App Problems
Hi all,
Since we've transitioned from using the Remote Desktop app to Windows App to access AVD, we've seen nothing but problems and severe limitations. These are described below. Is all hope lost ? Microsoft clearly know about these issues and don't care. The word is they have no intention of backtracking on their awful decision to deprecate the Remote Desktop app. Windows App has been out for nearly 3 years. In my experience, this means it's now 'mature' and therefore these problems and bugs will not be fixed. What should we all do ? Any thoughts ?
- Extremely poor reliability. For example, using Windows App to access our RDP jumpbox workspace, where we then run MSTSC.exe to jump onto on-prem servers remotely. Individual sessions randomly freeze with no errors logged or displayed. The individual server connection needs to be terminated and started again. Happens many times a day for our users. This started with the adoption of Windows App and got much worse with Microsoft's December and January Latest Cumulative Updates (LCUs) to Windows. These updates 'changed' RDP protocol handling (i.e., broke it).
- Windows App does not support multiple connections / app instances to the same AVD workspace. If I want to connect to 5 different servers by running MSTSC.exe 5 times concurrently in the same AVD workspace session, using one Windows App session, I can't. Windows App doesn't support multiple published application sessions. So I have to open Windows App 5 times. This causes the already terrible performance and reliability to be even worse.
- Abysmal performance. The software latency is wild. Typing feels like the server you're connected to is on the moon. Plus, Microsoft's operating system and software is so poorly implemented that it can't handle the keyboard buffer correctly with this latency and characters entered on the keyboard get substituted (out of order) and dropped regularly. You'll notice I said 'software latency' not network latency. That's because network latency from our remote PCs to Internet hosts is absolutely fine. The latency is in fact coming from Microsoft's own systems, and didn't occur when using the Remote Desktop app.
All this happens regardless of user's device hardware or network, and regardless of what target server we're connecting to, what version of Windows it's running, whether it's virtual or physical and, if physical, what physical hardware it's running.