Last week, Microsoft announced that it will not be pushing out its controversial Recall feature to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops releasing this week. Instead, the feature will be going through further beta testing by those who are using the Windows Insider preview builds first. But now, it looks like even said testers are no longer getting access to it.
As Tom’s Hardware reports, a part of the Recall feature, called Screenray, appeared in the Windows Insider Canary Build 26236.5000 for arm64 devices this past weekend. But on 18 June, when the aforementioned Snapdragon X laptops were due to hit the market, Microsoft stopped the distribution of said build, saying that it is pausing the rollout of the specific build.
A day later, a new build, version 26241.5000, was released instead, with no trace of Recall at all. The prior version has been wiped, and the only way to access it is if you already had it installed and didn’t update to the newer version, or already made an ISO for it.
In the update on the blog post from last week, Microsoft said that Recall on Copilot Plus PCs will be “a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program in the coming weeks”. The report speculates that this means that even Insiders will have to wait for a few weeks before they get access to Recall. Which may have been the original plan, until the previous version of the preview build included Screenray, which may or may not have been an accidental inclusion.
With all that being said, it remains to be seen when Recall will once again be something that’s available to the general userbase with the appropriate hardware. With the security issues plaguing the feature though, the general public is probably in no rush to give it a go.
(Source: Microsoft, Tom’s Hardware)
