Microsoft is working on stripping out the last vestiges of the classic Win32 user interface in Windows 11, and the company could completely remove the classic Win32 Control Panel in a future update. March Rogers, partner director of design at Microsoft, in a post on X, said that his team is working on migrating all the old controls from the Win32 Control Panel over to the modern Settings app. This will be a long-drawn-out process as the company wants to ensure the lack of the old Control Panel doesn't break any critical functionality, particularly with control panel applications that are part of device drivers, such as those provided by printer and network adapter manufacturers.

"We're working our way through migrating all the old control panel controls into the modern Settings apps. We're doing it carefully because there are a lot of different network and printer devices & drivers we need to make sure we don't break in the process," Rogers said. Control Panel is a classic Win32 shell application, technically "control.exe," with various software and device drivers including their own applications with the extension *.cpl which run under control.exe. The modern Settings app, on the other hand, is based on UWP (universal Windows platform), and the latest one conforms to Microsoft's WinUI 3 architecture, also known as "fluent design."Microsoft is recommending major ISVs to steer away from Win32 toward WinUI. A major example of this is Apple Music, which was a Win32 application till 2024, and transitioned to a rich, modern UWP app frontend that talks to a lightweight backend service. On machines with Intel Hybrid processors, this service runs on E-cores even with the frontend in the user's foreground, ensuring no jitter from thread migration or DPC latency spikes, something audiophiles with Apple Hi-Res lossless audio enabled could notice.