Assuming with COM/UWP you mean "UWP's flavor of COM" instead of "COM and/or UWP", is anyone actually using that outside of mobile trash and game engine backends for XB1?
All the Windows software i use and see people make are either Win32 or (much more often) built on top of Win32 (well, UWP is technically also built on top of Win32, but you are supposed to ignore that and act as if it isn't the case).
Yes they are, UWP is the future of Windows APIs since Windows 8, like it or not.
Win32 is slowly being migrated into sandbox model with each Windows 10 release and hasn't seen any big update since Vista. All major APIs introduced since then are based on COM.
I believe Windows will sooner become completely irrelevant than UWP becoming the dominant API to write Windows applications. Also seeing how MS is switching the system browser to Chromium, and kills the UWP version of MS Office, it looks like most people in Microsoft have lost faith in UWP too.
Microsoft didn't kill the UWP version, they merged it. Office is only becoming increasingly a hybrid. An increasing number of the controls are becoming UWP XAML-based.
It doesn't look like Microsoft has lost faith in UWP, only that they gained faith in UWP/Win32 hybrids (and all the complicated engineering work to make that happen), and Office seems to have helped lead the way there. For instance, Office is way more sandboxed than it has ever been before. (Office's own App-V work as far back as Office 2010 helped prototype the sandboxing approach Microsoft is applying to all of Win32 with the now focused opt-in MSIX installer.)
It's probably still too early to tell exactly how much UWP Microsoft will add to their Chromium mix, but there's already some bits there. For instance, the Chromium-based Edge still supports Netflix because they already integrated a UWP Island to (UWP API) Windows Media Foundation to support hardware-accelerated PlayReady DRM.
Based on previous history, chances are Microsoft will first abandon UWP (but leave its zombified corpse in Windows for backwards compatibility) and introducing something new-but-incompatible-with-anything-existing before Windows become irrelevant. Actually, they might do this 2-3 times before that.
> Yes they are, UWP is the future of Windows APIs since Windows 8, like it or not.
Well, i don't, but my two main gripes is that it seems to be an evolution of WPF which i never liked and that it is tied to a more locked down mobile-like approach that i abhor.
> Win32 is slowly being migrated into sandbox model with each Windows 10 release
What are you talking about?
> and hasn't seen any big update since Vista.
I'd say that it hasn't seen any big update since Windows 98 :-P but as long as it works i do not care.
> All major APIs introduced since then are based on COM.
That is for store stuff though, not Win32 itself and the vast majority of applications are not written for the store nor distributed through it (some do use it as a secondary means of distribution but from what i've heard the limitations are not worth it and the store itself is bad from a UX perspective).
Assuming with COM/UWP you mean "UWP's flavor of COM" instead of "COM and/or UWP", is anyone actually using that outside of mobile trash and game engine backends for XB1?
All the Windows software i use and see people make are either Win32 or (much more often) built on top of Win32 (well, UWP is technically also built on top of Win32, but you are supposed to ignore that and act as if it isn't the case).