Updates to Windows App Management in Intune with Winget

Hi Dennis0701. Let's start by addressing your comments on what's published to the Microsoft Store. As with all app stores, Microsoft does not and has never actually published anything to the Store (except actual Microsoft created apps). What's in the Store is published by the creators and vendors of those apps and beyond our explicit control. We do have a strict vetting process in place to ensure that nothing malicious is published, but what is actually published is not up to us. Thus, for your example of Adobe Reader only being published in a single language, that's something you need to address with Adobe and is not within our control.

As for apps being "non-official", that's a similar answer, however, don't confuse the public, community based WinGet repository with the Microsoft Store. They are two completely different repositories for apps. There is a similar vetting process for apps published to the community repository as well, but it does not include strict publisher verification to my knowledge which is part of the vetting process for apps published to the Microsoft Store.

For other third-party apps, I'll echo what I said above: this is on the vendor or creator of the app as we do not control who publishes their apps, what apps they publish, what versions they publish, or when they publish them. If you want to see the apps most useful to you published to the Microsoft Store (or the community repository) in a timely manner so that you can use them, I suggest reaching out out to those vendors and asking them to do so -- customers have much more power in this regard than we do.

As for WinGet not executing as the local System, this is not correct. Yes, a user must elevate for this to be the case, but this is no different than standard Win32 software installation has always been in Windows. WinGet doesn't change the nature of software installation on individual Windows systems, it just provides a convenient mechanism to easily acquire that sofware from known, trusted repositories. Additionally, this is the entire point of using an MDM as well, like Intune (which is the point of this article), as this will run the necessary WinGet "commands" and software installation elevated if configured to do so.

I fully agree that packing apps can be a time-consuming, sometimes painful process -- this is nothing new and has been like this for 30 years. That's entire point of the existance of app stores like the Microsoft Store though. We need customers help though to get apps published to the Store as it's just not something we can do (just like Apple doesn't actually publish apps to the Apple Store and Google doesn't publish apps to the Play Store); specifically, we need customers to tell the vendors of their softwre that this is what they whant them to do. As noted, the customer voice here is far more powerful than ours is. We (Microsoft) will never pay vendors to do this though and you wouldn't want us to either as the quality will never be controllable or suitable and is something we would most likely pass on to customers in some form anyway. Third-party software vendors need to be motivated by customer demand.

The final note here is that we have a great number of customers already actively and successfully using WinGet and the Intune integration with WinGet. These are just tools though that require participation by the entire ecosystem to make the software distribution process better and easier for all. These tools also don't change the nature of software installation, they just help facilitate it.