Microsoft confirms Creators Update disabled incompatible third-party AV

In a new blog post, Microsoft addresses complaints that the Windows 10 Creators Update pushes third-party anti-virus software solutions out of the market. The software giant admits is disabled some anti-virus tools, but stresses this was only done when the tool was deemed incompatible. Microsoft then turned on its own free Windows Defender tool and served a reminder to update to the latest version of the third-party AV tool:

Also, because AV software can be deeply entwined within the operating system, we doubled down on our efforts to help AV vendors be compatible with the latest updates. By the time the most recent Windows 10 Creators Update released on April 11, for example, nearly all of the antivirus applications that Microsoft tested were fully compatible. In fact, Microsoft’s application compatibility teams found that roughly 95% of Windows 10 PCs had an antivirus application installed that was already compatible with Windows 10 Creators Update.

For the small number of applications that still needed updating, we built a feature just for AV apps that would prompt the customer to install a new version of their AV app right after the update completed. To do this, we first temporarily disabled some parts of the AV software when the update began. We did this work in partnership with the AV partner to specify which versions of their software are compatible and where to direct customers after updating.

Full details at TechNet.