Hilary_Braun and others: I have to repeat the questions many others have asked: Why is there no feedback from you regarding the customer's feedback in here that this name is basically a stupid choice (sorry to be so blatant about this, but just think of any suppport case / researching for features and answers in the Internet and convince us otherwise)? I thought "Microsoft is listening to their customers"?
More importantly: In our case, we currently use the "Azure Virtual Desktop (Preview)" app to connect to our internal AVD machines. Now that it seems this app will never go out of preview in favor of the Windows "Windows App" app, we tried that. And found several problematic differences:
- In the AVD app, you could directly enter the workspace URL. In the new app, that URL is only automatically found through the email address, so email discovery for the RDS feed must be configured in DNS, otherwise it won't work (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/rds-email-discovery.). I don't think this is directly mentioned in the documentation so far. This is not a showstopper for us, but something we have to do additionally.
- The AVD app somehow natively uses the Windows system proxy and works flawlessly with it. The Windows App does not. Therefore it does not work in our corporate network. It loads forever (that is, a couple of minutes) and then states that no machines have been assigned to the user, when instead it should give a timeout error and some hint that it couldn't reach the Internet. Because when I opened it from an external network with deactivated VPN, I see my assigned machines a couple of seconds after opening the app. Googling for a solution here actually led to the right article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-app/admins/network-gateway-proxy-settings?tabs=macos - unfortunately setting a proxy for the app currently seems to be only possible in the very native Microsoft operating systems macOS and iOS/iPadOS. WTF?
- The fact that for some reason this app is not available on Android doesn't bother me as long as the Remote Desktop app remains available there and I can connect to my AVD machine in emergency situations via that way.
But I really fail to see what it is so complicated about integrating dozens of remote connection apps into one solution that covers all the use cases and has a sensible name.