HN Reader

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.

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.

It's telling that even Microsoft itself doesn't believe in the Microsoft Store.

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

It's also the default method used by Intune in the backend to deploy it on Windows systems.

At 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.

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.

I’ve read the article and still don’t know why.

Will this affect winget?

I always assumed the Microsoft Store was just windows' attempt at grabbing some of the app store money that apple and Google are making...