That's what I ended up using, in order to avoid repackaging the installer I built a payloadless deployment (dummy/empty .pkg, unsigned as it doesn't matter if it fails to run, followed by a post-install script that downloads the latest installer for each software to deploy, install them, then delete the temporary folder.
> It's simply easier for the Microsoft development team to maintain one version of the suite and they've chosen the most convenient option — Click-to-Run (vs Microsoft Store)
Must be significantly harder to develop MS Store apps. Due to sandboxing limitations?
Probably because there's internal conflicts between the store team and the applications group, that neither of them want to deal with anymore, this might have been for the windows S support (remember store only windows).
They have their own distribution system, so they don't need this anymore.
the installation story for devs writing windows apps has been dreadful for 3 decades.
vs used to help you build setup.exe, which was always a huge chore to use.
clickonce was launched to replace all this with hosted manifests and auto-updates and modern features like that, and immediately forgotten about because it was so broken. nobody ever used it.
then they brought out WinUI and the windows store, which was so overly sandboxed that it didn't fit most use cases and the permissions system of the store never seemed to line up with the APIs themselves.
then they tried their best to destroy myget by launching winget, which got forgotten about again. now even MS doesnt use their own store.
Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS? The process should be as simple as visiting app’s website, optionally paying, and installing. No middle man, hence less point of breakage.
No idea why have they created these MS Store versions. The same for MS Store Edge browser - it was (or is) just a downloader of an exe file from their webservers - useless piece of an app
If Microsoft won’t eat their own dogfood, why should they expect anyone else to?
This is why no one jumps onboard with new stuff Microsoft wants to push. They don’t stick to anything. A dev can constantly chase after Microsoft’s latest pet projects, or they can simply ignore all of it, knowing it will eventually fall out of fashion and save themselves (and their users) a lot of trouble.
I assumed it was a combination of a relic of the plans to have unified Phone/Desktop back in Win8 days and part of a goal of eventually locking things down as much as Apple has.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more random apps on Windows than macOS, so that was never going to be a good sell...
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[ 357 ms ] story [ 421 ms ] threadAt least they give the ability to be really specific about what you want to deploy using the Configuration XML file.
I wish they offered something similar on macOS.
Must be significantly harder to develop MS Store apps. Due to sandboxing limitations?
I suffered through this Store pain recently, after buying a $$ game from Microsoft: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/cant-install-forza-horizon-on... (11 things to try!)
Microsoft also had a separate EXE to download to try to repair things, along with wsreset, wscollect, etc. Far too complicated.
They have their own distribution system, so they don't need this anymore.
vs used to help you build setup.exe, which was always a huge chore to use.
clickonce was launched to replace all this with hosted manifests and auto-updates and modern features like that, and immediately forgotten about because it was so broken. nobody ever used it.
then they brought out WinUI and the windows store, which was so overly sandboxed that it didn't fit most use cases and the permissions system of the store never seemed to line up with the APIs themselves.
then they tried their best to destroy myget by launching winget, which got forgotten about again. now even MS doesnt use their own store.
This is why no one jumps onboard with new stuff Microsoft wants to push. They don’t stick to anything. A dev can constantly chase after Microsoft’s latest pet projects, or they can simply ignore all of it, knowing it will eventually fall out of fashion and save themselves (and their users) a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more random apps on Windows than macOS, so that was never going to be a good sell...