The venerable Windows Paint program, known to many by the name of its executable, mspaint.exe , has been marked as deprecated in the forthcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, The Guardian reports.

Deprecation states formally that the feature is no longer actively developed, and it serves as a warning that Microsoft may remove the feature in a future release. Removal isn't guaranteed, however; there are parts of the Win32 API that have been deprecated for 20 years but still haven't been removed. It's possible that Paint will continue to ship with Windows in a kind of zombie state: not subject to any active maintenance but kept around indefinitely since it's self-contained and not a security risk.

Indeed, the end of the development of Paint is not going to surprise anyone who actually uses the thing; the last time it received any non-negligible improvements was in Windows 7, when its user interface was updated to use a ribbon control. Before that, it had an interface that had been largely untouched since Windows 3.1. As such, Microsoft's official deprecation is merely confirming something that was already obvious; it's not an indicator that anything has actually changed.

While mspaint.exe isn't exactly good, it is at least basically adequate for simple tasks such as redacting information from screenshots. While there are plenty of zero-cost alternatives—I use paint.net—there's a certain convenience to having something in the box. Microsoft is still developing its Paint 3D program, but in spite of the nominal similarity, it currently has little overlap with the 2D painting app. Microsoft's other painting application, Fresh Paint, is strong from a creative perspective, with its simulations of natural media, but similarly, a weak alternative to Paint when it comes to cropping screenshots or adjusting individual pixels.

Update: As suspected, the app isn't actually going away. Microsoft has said that it will be moving to the Windows Store, and that future development will be made to Paint 3D. So, we wouldn't expect Paint to ever get any better, but it'll always be there as an option if you want it.