Handling application updates with App Installer and MSIX in Windows 10 19H1

Just an update from my previous post: We got confirmation that MSIX auto-updating functionality is NOT supported on Windows IoT. There was mention of an upgraded license to include it but it didn't look like the IoT version of Windows so I think they were talking about a regular desktop Windows SKU. This was definitely a major blocker for us, so we ended up needing to take the drastic step of porting the app to the web.

As a point of hopefully constructive feedback - I think the team at Microsoft that developed the ClickOnce framework understood that it was meant as a way of distributing native Windows apps (particularly enterprise apps) in a way that was close to the simplicity of distributing a web application. It may not have been very sophisticated, particularly with respect to version management, but it got the job done 90% of the time and we've relied on it for many years. It doesn't appear to me, from the architecture and behavior of the MSIX framework, that it was intended to address this important use case.

We need the following in order to consider MSIX again:

- It needs to work on every version of Windows (ClickOnce apps still work on Windows IoT! At least while Edge still supports them...)

- It needs at least the option to force the app to update before launching. This is an enterprise app.