The Control Panel might finally be seeing its last days, as the Settings app is finally taking over Windows. The Settings app was first introduced in 2012 with the launch of Windows 8, and the migration from Control Panel to Settings has been happening slowly ever since.
To be fair to Control Panel, the Settings Controller has been considered dead for years and has yet to be purged. Yet this nearly 40-year-old feature has been around in one form or another since 1985, when Windows 1.0 was introduced.
However, Microsoft never wrote that the Control Panel was going away. At most we could read a tweet from 2015 reported by Neowin, in which a senior Microsoft official confirmed that “Settings will eventually replace the Control Panel.”
Microsoft hasn't officially announced the demise of Control Panel, but in a support page, Microsoft noted that Control Panel will be “deprecated in favor of Settings in the Settings app, which provides a more modern and streamlined experience.”
The page goes on to give Windows users a piece of advice: “While the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you are encouraged to use the Settings app whenever possible.”
Since the introduction of Settings, the Control Panel has gradually lost functionality to the new app. The only reason it still exists seems to be compatibility, a problem that Microsoft has yet to overcome in the last 12 years.
In recent years, Microsoft has focused on modernizing and streamlining Windows. In fact, the Settings app was created more for touchscreens, although the software giant has moved away from that idea.
In the meantime, the Control Panel still exists and is accessible. One day it will disappear, but that's not happening today.
There is no specific date for when the Windows Control Panel will finally disappear after its slow deprecation. We've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this article if and when the company responds.