[Q] Migrating from winget to Microsoft Store

[snowfoxsh]

I have a package that is currently hosted on winget (snowfoxsh.aplang) but am considering moving it to the microsoft store to increase availability. I read that microsoft store packages are allow available on winget. If were to migrate from winget to microsoft store would my users still be able to install a particular version of my package with winget? Also should i remove my package from winget once the microsoft store package is available?

[Trenly]

The answer here is that it depends.

WinGet has the built-in msstore source, which allows users to install apps from the Microsoft Store using WinGet. However, there are several limitations with this. First, is that users need to either provide a strong correlation for the package to be matched successfully (i.e, using the full name of the application for winget install) or they need to use the MSStore ID for the application. The second is that the MSStore source doesn't really handle versioning - everything is always the latest version, and will be updated automatically through the Microsoft Store after it's installed. This means that using WinGet to install the msstore version would result in them being unable to select a specific version.

However, that doesn't mean that the Microsoft Store has to be the only distribution method. By maintaining a manifest in this repo, it is added to the winget source. It can be a bit confusing, I know, but WinGet [the application] compiles application information from both the msstore source [Microsoft Store] and the winget source [this repository], which means that you can have two distribution methods simultaneously. The package can be in both the Microsoft store and this repository. This does bring in some interesting complications though, such as when users have both installed.

[snowfoxsh]

Thank you, that was exactly the answer i was looking for!