Programs and Features vs Apps & Features in Windows 10 and 11
Programs and Features is the classic Control Panel applet that lists installed desktop programs in a sortable table, while Apps & Features (called Installed apps in Windows 11) is its replacement in the Settings app. Both uninstall software. Programs and Features still opens in Windows 10 and Windows 11 with the command appwiz.cpl, and it remains the better view for comparing many programs at once, repairing installers and adding detail columns.
This guide shows how to open each tool, what each one can and cannot do, and which one to use for common tasks such as uninstalling, repairing and auditing installed software.
How to open Programs and Features
Programs and Features opens fastest through the Run dialog: press Windows+R, type appwiz.cpl and press Enter. The applet still ships in both Windows 10 and Windows 11, and Microsoft's own uninstall instructions still list the Control Panel route next to Settings.
- Search for Control Panel on the taskbar and open it.
- Select Programs, then Programs and Features (in Category view).
- In Large icons or Small icons view, select Programs and Features directly.
- Right-click a program and pick Uninstall, Uninstall/Change, Change or Repair, depending on what the installer offers.
The left pane of the applet also links to "Turn Windows features on or off", the dialog for optional components such as Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox or the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime. Typing "programs and features" into Start search usually finds the applet as well.
How to open Apps & Features in Settings
Apps & Features lives in the Settings app under Apps, and Windows 11 renamed the list to Installed apps. The quickest way in is to right-click the Start button and choose the apps entry at the top of the menu, or open Settings with Windows+I.
- Windows 11: Settings > Apps > Installed apps. Select the More (three dots) button next to an app to uninstall it or open Advanced options.
- Windows 10: Settings > Apps > Apps & features. Select an app to reveal the Modify, Move and Uninstall buttons.
The Settings list combines classic desktop programs with Microsoft Store apps in one place, which the Control Panel applet never did. Store apps only appear here, so this is the page to use when you want to remove or reset an app that came from the Store or shipped with Windows. Microsoft also notes that some apps cannot be uninstalled from Settings and points users to the Control Panel for those, which is one reason both tools still exist side by side.
Programs and Features vs Apps & Features: the differences
Programs and Features is built for scanning and comparing, while Apps & Features is built for touch-friendly, one-app-at-a-time management. The Control Panel applet shows installed programs in a compact table with Name, Publisher, Installed On, Size and Version columns. A click on any column header sorts the list, and right-clicking the header and choosing More adds extra columns, for example the support link or the readme file the developer registered.
Settings shows the same programs as a spaced-out list, so fewer entries fit on screen. Sorting by name, size or install date and filtering by drive sit in menus above the list, and there is no way to add more data fields even when the developer provides them.
| Feature | Programs and Features (Control Panel) | Apps & Features / Installed apps (Settings) |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Store apps | Not listed | Listed with desktop programs |
| Layout | Compact table, sortable headers | Spaced list, sort menu at the top |
| Extra data columns | Yes, via right-click on the header | No |
| Filter by drive | No | Yes |
| Repair | Repair or Change, if the installer supports it | Advanced options: Repair and Reset for supported apps |
| Windows optional features | Link in the left pane | Separate Optional features page |
Which one should you use?
Use Programs and Features when you work with classic desktop software and want an overview, and use Settings when the app came from the Microsoft Store or needs a reset. A short decision guide:
- Find what was installed recently: Programs and Features, sorted by Installed On, shows the timeline at a glance.
- Find what takes up space: either tool can sort by size; Settings adds a per-drive filter.
- Fix a broken desktop program: right-click it in Programs and Features and choose Repair or Change.
- Fix a broken Store app: in Settings, open Advanced options and try Repair first, then Reset (Reset deletes the app's data).
- Remove a built-in or Store app such as the Photos app in Windows 11: Settings, or PowerShell for apps without an Uninstall button.
- Uninstall or update many programs at once: neither tool does batches; the command line Windows Package Manager (winget) handles bulk updates.
If you prefer the table layout but want more than Windows offers, third-party uninstallers such as Revo Uninstaller or Geek Uninstaller use a similar list view and add leftover cleanup after the regular uninstall.
Is Microsoft removing Programs and Features?
Microsoft has been moving Control Panel functions into Settings since Windows 10 launched in 2015, but Programs and Features is still available in current Windows 10 and Windows 11 releases. In 2020, Windows 10 Insider builds briefly sent the Control Panel's Programs and Features link to Apps & Features in Settings, the change that prompted this article, yet the classic applet stayed reachable through appwiz.cpl.
The practical takeaway: the Settings page is where Microsoft adds new app management features, such as Store app repair and reset, while the Control Panel applet is maintained for compatibility and gets no new features. If a future update removes the Control Panel entry point, check whether appwiz.cpl still works before switching to third-party tools, since the command has outlived several earlier redirections.
FAQ
Why is a program missing from Programs and Features?
Programs and Features lists only desktop programs that registered an uninstall entry with Windows. Microsoft Store apps and portable programs that run without an installer do not appear there; check Settings for Store apps.
Is Apps & Features the same as Installed apps?
Yes. Windows 10 calls the Settings page Apps & features, and Windows 11 uses the name Installed apps under Settings > Apps for the same list.
Can I create a shortcut to Programs and Features?
Yes. Create a new desktop shortcut and enter appwiz.cpl as the location; double-clicking it opens the Control Panel applet directly.
Related: how to uninstall Phone Link and changing default programs in Windows
Once upon a time, Linux imitated Windows. Nowadays, Windows imitates Android…
Latest Windows version, and Programs & Features is still my go-to choice.
File explorer > Dropdown lefthand from path > Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features > Voilà !.
BTW, I never install insider builds ;->
the Geek uninstaller seems to work easily and quickly and shows the leftovers you can delete.
I guess Microsoft doesn’t want users to uninstall all their new bloatware a.k.a. ‘features’ which they seem to add by the boatload these days so they’re making it as difficult as possible to find them.
A BIG one: right click on one of those headers and you’ll see SO MANY TABS. It’s just like Task Manager. There is so much functionality in those tabs!
microsoft is freaking pathetic. they’ve let windows languish and continue to ruin it at the same time. it sounds oxymoronic but it’s true.
Same ol garbage from Microsoft!
The entire UI and direction makes me long for Vista. I am willing to bet if the community put as much effort into getting vista (at the time) respectable than they do now at trying to wrangle and repair/rebuild windows 10 then it would be… well… 10 times the OS windows 10 is.
Windows 10 is simply a rubbish OS which is why they gave it away free. They know its rubbish but its rubbish designed for a purpose to spend as little money on it as possible and get the most return as possible as they harvest your data and control you at every turn.
Idiotic UI’s are a consequence of the Microsoft not knowing its place and failing to tailor an OS for each device. This is Microsoft trying to compromise to save money once again and have their OS work on various devices such as those terribly overpriced slab units known as Surface so those touch bozo’s can get their fill with massive buttons and oversized words with key features hidden from view because you guessed it those slobs don’t actually know what a computer is or understand so they have no inclination to do more than do the usual metrosexual task and fluff their instgram and stroke their social media pages whilst thinking they are kings of the world when they are truly bottom of the barrel.
Btw, I only used vista as an example because it was the most complained about OS in the past but hey, its not looking so bad now is it?
It’s a shame we can’t bring operating systems forward ourselves because in many ways windows 7 was better than 10 only that it never supported scaling for larger monitors and things such as directx 12, these were deliberately not included by Microsoft as a Service pack for obvious reasons by Microsoft. The point is that anything that is of any sort of worth in windows 10 could have been included in windows 7 by Microsoft but in order to make windows 10 seem like a decent OS they did so by abandoning not only their former direction but willfully excluding features to the former OS that would have made it head and shoulders better than 10 but that of course meant that Microsoft would have had to have kept their staff and also not have so much control over the way you use the OS.
I have little doubt the next version of Windows will be much worse given what I have seen.
Vista was actually really nice. The only reason people said it was unstable was because they didn’t have the right hardware for it. Microsoft screwed up there. I associate Vista with my childhood and Flash. RIP.
Like everything Windows 10, this goes from ugly to uglier. Ugh.
“When Microsoft announced that it would replace the entire Control Panel with the Settings app in Windows 10, no one thought that it would take the company longer than five years to achieve that goal.”
oh i did, they had a good usable os in 7, 10 is a hilarious bugridden monstrosity and i wager it still doesnt display photoshop psd images as XP used to in the file manager!
Short of being forced to Windows 10, I have yet to see a compelling reason or even a single functional component that would make (or would have made) a Windows 7 user actually want to move to Windows 10. Even the underhood changes are not compelling, regardless of any claims of better security.
But then again, this is the same company that gave us the “ribbon” and made Office the usability nightmare it is today.
I wonder how much work it takes to be that consistently bad.
The biggest problem I have with the modern Settings app, compared to the original Control Panel program, is the fact all changes you make to settings are instant.
What I mean by this is, if you accidentally change an option while navigating your way through the Settings GUI, which is actually very easily done, there’s no ”Cancel’ button to fall back on to undo the change. Worse still, you could accidentally change an option without even realizing you’ve done it, until sometime later.
Not having a way to undo changes is to me the major flaw with all GUI’s, such as the Settings app, which are designed for both touch and mouse input.
Bring back ‘Apply’, ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ that’s what I say!
I find the entire “new” Settings part in Windows hard to navigate and a lot more difficult to find the stuff you need to change (probably intended). The old Control Panel was far more powerful then the recent Settings part of Windows 10. I just miss the Control Panel parts that are already ported over to the new Settings.
I am so glad I moved to Linux 2 years ago.
Windows 10 has been a trainwreck since the start and it keeps on getting worse (dumbified) by every update.
It’s insane how someone at Microsoft thinks this new UI style is “good design”.
The whole Windows 10 Ui (start menu, and Tiles) along with Setting apps. Windows store etc. was design for Cell phone in mind. Now the cell phone business is dead, why don’t they revert back to Great Windows 7 Ui Design. Windows 10 Ui is mess.
Best thing to do is to use the feedback feature in Windows 10 and let the MS developers know that you would prefer a more compact version of the applet. If more people did this, it’s likely that Microsoft might actually listen and do something about the problem. That is, assuming that the feedback feature actually provides feed back to MS and that feedback doesn’t actually wind up in the aether.
It’s business as usual for the new Microsoft: More clicks is always better, removing functions and choices will please customers and so will the need for more scrolling. Huge controls are useful so that people with very bad vision will still be able to see everything. In the old days, this required setting some preferences but now most of us will be able to read the screen some from across the room.
The settings app continues to be horrible which means that Microsoft has succeeded. I still remember when their desire was to improve Windows but that was so long ago that many young people will not have seen any of it.
The same functions in multiple locations speaks to the disorganization of Windows 10.
I despise that Settings thing, it’s gigantic, has so much white (or black, depending) space and many of the categories overlap. Hard to tell if you’ve visited all the items for a particular feature.
Doesn’t have to be this way. If Open Shell can take the awful, again gigantic, start menu and resize it to something much smaller and more readable, that Settings thing can be redrawn for non-touchscreens.
Typically, I use BulkCrapUninstaller to remove programs; it’s portable, thorough, cleans up remnants well and shows a multitude of programs Windows’ Program and Features ignores.
https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
As for the redirection, IDK, what direction are they taking? Years of half baked changes here and there could go anywhere.
Why not give us the choice which one to use? Why replace a functional desktop UI with a mobile phone UI?Windows 10 continues to be destroyed by unskilled idiots at Microsoft.
There is no usable upgrade path anymore. I’m sticking with LTSC for longest I could, then moving to another operating system.
Use Everything to clean up after your utility uninstall program, which runs Windows install then does its own search, but not if you don’t understand what you are doing.
I just use Wise Program Uninstaller for uninstalling things as it cleans the leftovers, have been using various uninstaller tools for years.
Not only is Apps & Features a far horrible UI but it has critical bug. It fails to uninstall MSIs created by WiX toolset. Says msiexec cannot be found. See here: https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/issues/4857
Another way now to avoid Apps & Features for those of you who use Open-Shell or Classic Shell is to just add shell:ChangeRemoveProgramsFolder to the Link field of a Custom item in the Start menu from Customize tab in its Settings. You get an expanding menu that lets you uninstall programs directly from the Start menu.
It can expand into multiple columns and if it’s a long list that doesn’t fit in multiple columns, just hold down Shift before expanding the folder and it’ll expand as a single column scrolling list. You can also directly jump by starting letter in the menu to the program to uninstall e.g. F for Flash Player.
The Windows 10 UI can be summed up as “one step forward, two steps back”. It’s now 5 years since RTM and it still looks so amateurish and unfinished in many places.
At this point CCleaner will become the most approachable uninstall panel.
MS and Firefox design teams do not even use the software thy design. MS design teams use Macs and proudly blog about it and Firefox design team uses apple tablets with most likely safari and makes videos about it. They don’t have to care about the features they remove and app they ruin because they don’t even interact with them.
Someone here already has started working on an alternative Windows 10 settings app https://github.com/builtbybel/control-uwp
But that looks just as bad as the current crappy settings app. We want something designed for our desktops!
The biggest horror of them all is the file association and that personal settings are being reset after updates.
An equal horror can be found in Mozilla Firefox’s saved logons and passwords… force clicking everyone with an absolutely silly design.
I would like to force all those responsible to change and check settings for at least 24h… lets see if they then have a desire to get back to a table like structure…
I would like to interrogate them all those responsible in a dark and humid dungeon and listen to what they have to say about usabillity, administration, design and broken wrists and numb fingers
These type of settings are a mess on any OS I’ve used. Windows, Android, Linux variants KDE, LXDE, GNOME, yada yada, even my favorite XFCE some obviously related settings are scattered and unintuitive to find. The one I don’t have an opinion of is Apple anything and I don’t plan to. Since this issue is so prevalent the most sane course of action has been frequency of use and time. That means settings that were once easy to find in Window 7 are now a pain in Windows 10 and of course now it sounds as if Microsoft is going to do it again! Nothing useful here and as the title says, just a “Comment”.
“Now You: how do you uninstall software? What is your take on the redirection?”
I take off and nuke the software from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. ;-)
Why is Microsoft wasting money making these stupid changes?
I guess they have to justify the existence of the software development department.
The Windows 7 start menu was great. Why did they have to replace it with something inferior?
I like Revo Uninstaller Pro more than ever. It is so much more than Windows is ever likely to be. I would love to see a current review by Martin.
We should not mess with the registry.
Wait until you try the install option. Revo will record everything the installer does to make.it easier to uninstall a program. This is easily my favorite feature.
As far as Apps and Features go its awesome, if it were on a cell phone. Navigating the UI in W10 requires far more clicks and scrolling than W7, so incredibly stupid.
Now I don’t blame Microsoft (completely) for the mess software leaves behind after being uninstalled…but there is room for improvement there. Still, a lot of developers don’t spend the same effort on cleaning up as they do for getting software installed.
Have been using Revo Uninstaller (portable version) for many, many years as it cleans up your system far better than the tools provided by Microsoft. My reason at the time was a big loss of time trying to re-install Oracle’s XE10 product.
Since then I started to replace installable applications with portable applications solely used Revo for uninstalling. Haven’t had a reason to periodically re-install Windows to get rid of the accumulated “cruft”.
So whatever Microsoft does to their settings screen, it won’t be affecting my workflow.
Quite often clicking ‘uninstall’ in the Settings app, or choosing ‘uninstall’ after right clicking on a tile in the start menu, causes the ‘programs and features’ control panel applet to open.
What’s going to happen with those programs that apparently can’t be uninstalled with the settings app?
I install and uninstall a lot of games because ‘my precious’ WD Black is only 1TB in size.
Most often, I go into the games folder and run the included unistall.exe from there.
Yeah, the transition process is taking longer than it should have.
What I don’t understand is why the size of items in the new Metro apps is still so big as if it’s aimed at touch devices and not devices with mouse and keyboard. Sure, there are some laptops that have touch screens and there is Surface, but I think more than 90% of Windows 10 devices have only mouse and keyboard and this massive size of items make it very bulky.
There should at least be some scaling in place that makes them more dense when no touch screen is detected or at least allow people to change it manually via a setting somewhere.
Not only as mentioned in the article there is the lack of options, it also still looks very ugly, bland and boring. It doesn’t have that “professional” feel of the old Win32 programs with all the buttons and everything. It feels like a mobile app running on a desktop in both appearance and functionality.
I’m happy that some Metro apps and Edge are getting the rounded corner treatment and sizes of items is better, but how long will it take for the Settings app and Start Menu to follow suit too?
I’m also looking forward to all windows having rounded corners once again, because sharp corners feel like something that’s unrefined, like an early alpha placeholder element just for basic functionality. For a while I thought that was due to scaling reasons with some people having 720p resolutions and others having 4k or so, but even so, having rounded corners with just 3 pixels less can scale just fine regardless of resolution size. At this point I call this sloppiness and laziness on Microsoft’s part.
Overall I can deal with the changes in Windows 10 compared to Windows 7, but I will always lament the loss of the beautiful UI that Windows 7 had. Even if all the gloss and gradients somehow feels dated, just taking example of Mac OS, Linux, iOS and Android is a good example of how can a UI look nice with rounded edges.
Is the cpl (appwiz.cpl) removed?
If you run “control appwiz.cpl” does it not work anymore?
I bet 5 bucks it’s not removed