Windows 10 22H2 (Build 19045) spotted

[German]Microsoft has revealed (intentionally or unintentionally) at an optional update for Windows Insiders in the RP channel that there will be a further build 19045 for a Windows 10 22H2 after Windows 10 21H2. According to the nomenclature, this feature update must still appear in 2022 – my guess is this fall. And it's now clear that the only Windows 10 feature update for 2022 will be rolled out as a "minor update."

Those on Windows 10 will still get support and security updates until October 14, 2025. But so far, there's been no word of an Insider Preview coming as a feature update in 2022. This had already tempted me to the article Will Windows 10 21H2 (build 19044) be the last feature update?, where I speculated that no new feature updates were coming to end of live. 

Windows 10 22H2 (Build 19045)

Now Microsoft has rather unintentionally revealed that there will still be a Windows 10 22H2 (Build 19045) in 2022. As of June 23, 2022, Microsoft has made an optional update KB5014666 available for Windows 10 Insiders in the Release Preview Channel (RP), for which nothing in the way of details has been announced yet. Only the colleagues from deskmodder.de noticed the update and posted a short message here.

While experimenting with the update, I noticed that a reference to Windows 10 22H2 (build 19045) is displayed in Winver. The colleagues point out the issue in the above tweet as well as in this German article. In the article, deskmodder.de describes how to integrate the packages for activating Windows 10 22H2 (build 19045) in an administrative prompt. So far, however, Winver only reports Windows 10 22H2 (build 19045) – so the whole thing is pretty pointless, there are probably no new features yet.

However, this update reveals on the one hand that Microsoft probably intends to release a Windows 10 22H2 in the fall (probably in parallel with Windows 11 22H2). After all, the upgrade cycles for Windows 10 and Windows 11 have already been increased to one year each starting in 2022. It is also clear that Windows 10 22H2 will be released via a so-called enablement update.

Background: Enablement updates

For blog readers who may not be that into the subject matter, a few more explanations. Since 2019, Microsoft has been trying to roll out fall updates for Windows 10 as a 'small update'. In other words, the code for certain Windows 10 builds is the same internally, but the features of the individual builds are then unlocked via a so-called enablement update. This allows Microsoft to distribute updates to different Windows 10 builds.

This was first practiced with the 190x versions of Windows 10. The Spring Update (Windows 10 version 1903) came as a full feature update with a complete image. Windows 10 version 1909 was then implemented as a 'small feature update'. The code for Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909 is the same – they even use common updates. Instead of downloading gigabytes of code for a feature update, Windows 10 versions 1909 was deployed as a so-called 'enablement update'. A small, approximately 500 kByte update package simply switches versions.

Microsoft has maintained this practice ever since – although now the twice-yearly released updates have been dropped since 2022. The current builds Windows 10 21H1 and 21H2 have also been updated with an enablement update (Windows 10 2004 is no longer supported).