We’ve been hard at work improving the Microsoft Store experience in Intune in preparation for the Microsoft Store for Business and Education retirement. In November 2022, we released a new and improv...
Updated Aug 19, 2024
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Adding your Microsoft Store for Business and Education apps to the Microsoft Store in Intune
Hi All,
For the sake of transparency : I work with Vincent on this topic.
If I get it correctly, we are here talking about LOBs, where Software Vendors must sign their applications with their own Signing Code Cert. As you know, we have a UWP application (therefore, leveraging the "secure" context of MSIX packages).
However, if we look at the side-loading part, the documentation clearly warns you about the below:
When you enable sideloading, you allow installing and running apps from outside the Microsoft Store. This action might increase security risks to the device and your data. Sideloaded apps need to be signed with a certificate that the device trusts.
I guess it would be hard to require customers (enterprises) to enable side-loading on their devices when they read this kind of notice from the Microsoft documentation.
Being able to pull our application (offline) from the Business Store and distribute it the way that suited us best was the greatest part of all this for us.
I am uncertain why this specific capability has been removed, but it would be good to understand the reasons behind it, and also if an alternative could be found for companies in our situation.