Support MSIX / AppX as a primary application package type

Very much needed for Claude Cowork!

Just wanted to give a bit of an inside look at this one since it currently sits as our second highest voted item.

We will absolutely add MSIX support; it's a when, not an if.

One deterrent has been the lack of uptake in the industry. The number of vendors and products taking up the new standard was low and where they were they did so in addition to their MSI/EXE installers. Even beyond that, few of them were critical apps that our telemetry showed high update on. That has obviously changed; Teams was an early one to buck that trend, but it has continued.

A second deterrent is that Microsoft appears to have all but abandoned MSIX. We used to know the PMs for MSIX, I've seen them publicly present on their design goals, current status, and future roadmap. That all seems to be gone now; it feels like MS is calling it 'done'.

Lastly, the largest deterrent has been purely internal to Patch My PC. The way we built our catalog was strongly influenced by the WSUS metadata rules and ConfigMgr's catalog structure. Neither of these natively support MSIX and our entire process keyed off building those. We have spent over a year reengineering our entire catalog process to make those artifacts of the process instead of what it revolved around. We are nearly there, our packaging team is finalizing that work. That won't deliver MSIX support itself, but it makes adding MSIX possible and much, much simpler.

We needs MSIX support to install the intune specific claude desktop app, and allow the Cowork feature to work.

Add Teams offline support with the switch to remove classic.

PowerShell's MSI is being deprecated starting with 7.7 GA. 7.6 is the final MSI version. We'll need MSIX for continuing support of this app.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/powershell-msi-deprecation/

Python is switching their deployment from individual packages to python install manager in the near future. Install manager is deployed via MSIX package. Please add support for this package.

Please also add "Warehouse Management App" (Dynamics 365) for Windows.

https://ideas.patchmypc.com/ideas/PATCHMYPC-I-7881

Please add - Drawboard PDF for Windows - A powerful PDF editor to the list as well. :)

For security we block the store and Winget, so would be helpful to have MSIX packages for Windows app and Company Portal

Needed for the new Remote desktop tool, stupidly called Windows App. What is wrong with Microsoft? First the name is just dumb and second they decide to go to MSIX?

https://www.marticliment.com/unigetui/
They do this using Winget, would be fantastic to leverage Winget updates into PMPC!

Especially for ConfigMgr, where it doesn't allow you to easily push store app updates out like Intune.

I don't know about Config Manager, but most of these are available to install from the Microsoft Store using functionality built into Intune.

Great, all links are working. Thanks for sharing

Also 1Password announcing deprecation of exe in favour of MSIX.

I'd say yes to adding MSIX/AppX support, but still keep support for everything else. I don't think I have any MSIX/AppX installers in my repository.. that I'm aware of. I tend to stay away from MSI installers because they always seem to be bulky and slow to install on older machines that lack sufficient memory. Oh the biggest drawback of MSI is that you can only install one at a time. When I reinstall a machine, I tend to run multiple installers at the same time and get bogged down when I have to install Office and wait..

Also add for Slack MSIX as well.

idea is https://ideas.patchmypc.com/ideas/PATCHMYPC-I-6045

This would be a huge selling point, IMO. MSIX packages offer a lot of security improvements and can be updated or uninstalled very cleanly.

+999