Past few days have been rough for Windows Phone users as they have been unable to make use of the Windows Store to download apps. People talking to us as well as Microsoft’s support forum revealed that Windows Phone Store was throwing error 80070020.
Despite Windows Phone 8.1 reached the end of mainstream support, the platform is still supposed to function properly. Microsoft previously stated that Windows Store would continue to function normally for these handsets for at least 12 months.
As expected, Microsoft has today rolled out an update to fix this issue with Windows Phone Store, and the Store will start working again in a couple of hours or days.
While digging the Microsoft Support forum, we discovered that the software giant had forgotten to renew the SSL certificate of its Windows Phone marketplace domain. As the certificate was broken, Windows Phone Store couldn’t authenticate with Microsoft servers.
Microsoft earlier today replaced the certificate and the store has already started to work for some users. In case Windows Phone Store is not working yet, you may need to wait for a couple of days.
Microsoft recently ended support for notifications and live tiles on Windows Phone 8.0 and 7.5. This means that the devices running Windows Phone 8.0 no longer receives any notification and live tile updates. The small number of users still using Windows Phone will certainly be disappointed, but it’s also worth noting that the Android phones software update system is worse than Microsoft’s mobile platform.
Microsoft promises to continue offer support for Windows Phone 8.1, but it’s just a matter time until Microsoft pulls support for these devices as well. Microsoft is not planning to release any new updates for Windows 10 Mobile, with the end of support due in late 2019, so new features will be introduced. If you are still interested in Windows Phone, your best bet would be a new Windows 10 Mobile handset.
