What just happened? It seems that Microsoft's controversial Recall feature is causing the company plenty of headaches despite not being officially released yet. The company has pulled the Windows 11 24H2 update from the Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders, likely due to the Recall changes it announced last week.
Recall has proved about as controversial as expected, given the feature works by constantly taking screenshots of everything you do on a computer and presenting users with a scrollable timeline of past activity.
Security researchers warned that Recall had glaring security holes as the OCR (optical character recognition) data for each snapshot is stored in a plaintext SQLite database file. A Microsoft researcher was asked about the concerns surrounding Recall last week, but they gave a non-answer.
On Friday, Microsoft posted an update about certain changes it intends to make before the Recall preview ships to customers on June 18. The biggest change is that it will be opt-in only. Windows Hello enrolment will be mandatory for enabling Recall, and the search index database will be encrypted for added security.
In a different update posted on the same day, Microsoft wrote that it was temporarily pausing the rollout of Windows 11 version 24H2 to the Release Preview Channel and that it will resume the rollout in the coming weeks.
Microsoft never gave a reason why it is pausing the rollout, but the Recall changes seem like the most obvious answer. The Redmond firm notes that new AI features, including Recall, won't be immediately available as they require one of the new Copilot+ PCs. However, we've already seen unofficial apps that enable the feature on unsupported Arm64 PCs.
In addition to the Recall changes, Microsoft could have pulled Windows 11 24H2 due to all the technical issues users have been experiencing. There are complaints in the feedback hub about application freezing, poor performance, and VPNs not working properly, notes The Reg.
Beyond the AI features, Windows 11 24H2 offers previews of Wi-Fi 7 support, HDR background support, Sudo for Windows, Rust in the Windows kernel, and more.