Monthly Archives: August 2015

How to make your Pebble smartwatch really tick

“Tick tock, goes the clock, And Now what shall we play?”.

Pebble smartwatch is an amazing piece of hardware with no less amazing software to support it. Pebble appstore boasts huge variety of watchfaces from intricately carved art pieces to simplicity personified. And the apps, my gods the apps! You want to track your sleep, count swimming stokes, automate your home – Pebble can do all those things and more. But something was missing. Something that ordinary mechanical clocks could do since the dawn of time.

Tick tock, goes the clock, And then what shall we see?
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Solution: Windows 10: Unable to start Appstore apps

Ok, I went ahead and upgraded to Windows 10. everything went smoothly, all my settings and installed apps preserved and work without a hitch. I am loving the interface and getting along with Cortana pretty good.

But after a while I encountered a weird issue: Appstore installed apps – e.g. Calendar, Mail etc. even Windows AppStore itself wouldn’t launch. I’d either get a cryptic error message, something along the lines “Application did not start, please contact system administrator” or very briefly a window would appear and immediately closed.

Looking into Event log was a bit more explanatory, but not too much: “Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App failed with error: Access is denied. See the Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational log for additional information.

If you google it – you will find many possible explanations of the problem and many possible ways to solve it offered, but none of those worked for me. Finally I figured it out (and Event Log entry gave me a clue): C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder was missing necessary permissions:

WindowsApps

Namely, “ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES” was missing read & execute permissions on that folder (had to to uncheck “Hide protected operating system files” in Control Panel, File Explorer options to be able to see it). Once I added correct permissions – appstore apps started launching with no problems.