Microsoft is finally fixing app updates on Windows

Windows 8 might have made waves for its short-lived removal of the beloved Start button, but the platform’s launch of an ill-fated storefront for streamlined app management was arguably Microsoft’s biggest blunder of all.

With the Windows 8 Store, the company attempted to shrug off traditional Windows desktop software and leap toward an overly ambitious vision that almost immediately collapsed. But at its Build 2025 developers’ conference this year, Microsoft circled back to correct that mistake — and to announce something the company should have debuted decades ago.

Microsoft had a chance to fix Windows’ long-messy application update process with the launch of that Store app alongside Windows 8 in 2012. Instead, it spent more than a decade flailing — training PC users to ignore the Store experience and forcing application developers to keep updating their apps the painful old-fashioned way.

Thankfully, that’s all about to change — assuming, that is, that app developers actually sign on this time.

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The Windows app updating nightmare

The application updating experience has long been one of the worst-designed parts of Windows. Each application has to update itself — or not. In the best-case scenario, each application quietly installs its own security updates, but even then, you’re wasting system resources by running a mess of different updaters just to try to keep up.

In the worst-case scenario, an app might not check for updates at all — or it could check for updates and then prompt you to install them manually. One of the worst things about using a Windows PC you haven’t used in a while isn’t just the Windows Update experience — it’s that each application you use prompts you for its own individual updates and requires clicking and clicking and waiting, often after you’re ready to start using it.

For businesses, things are even worse. How does a business manage application updates on a fleet of PCs and ensure each application has the latest ones installed? There’s nothing built into Windows for that — and no single place a Windows user can go to check whether their PC’s software is all secure, either.

How Windows 8 botched the dream

When Microsoft put together Windows 8, it created the Windows Store. It was meant to be an app-store-style experience for installing and updating software on Windows. But it only worked with Windows 8’s Metro apps — later called Modern apps or Store-style apps. (Microsoft never even nailed down an enduring name for them.)

That meant traditional desktop apps were left out in the cold. Microsoft eventually let desktop apps into the Store with Windows 11, but by then, many users were well-trained to ignore the store — and many desktop apps in the Store were deeply set in using their own updater mechanisms, even when you installed them from the Store.

When the Store says an app is “Provided and updated” by the developer, that means the Store won’t help update it.Chris Hoffman, Foundry

It didn’t have to be this way. The goal shouldn’t have been about creating an “app store” on Windows — it should have been about providing a unified app update experience. Linux figured this out decades ago with package managers like apt-get. The unified app installation and update experience was always one of the best things about the Linux desktop, even back in the days of Windows XP.

Microsoft itself figured this out with a little-known package manager and software installation tool called Winget, but it never managed to bring it to the mainstream PC-using masses. Winget is hidden and designed only for power users — but it does actually provide a single place where you can update installed applications.

How Windows 11 will finally fix it

While everyone was talking about AI after Microsoft Build 2025, one absolutely historic change to Windows didn’t get much press: “a unified future for app updates on Windows.”

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Angie Chen explains that Windows Update will soon handle not only operating system updates but also any update, including application updates and hardware drivers. Application developers will be able to “plug into” the Windows Update experience.

Notably, that doesn’t mean that all app updates will be uploaded to Windows Update and distributed from Microsoft’s servers. Rather, it means an application like Google Chrome can stop using its own updater and use the built-in Windows frameworks to offer updates for Chrome. You could get updates for all your installed apps in a single spot, and the Windows Update user experience would provide that elusive unified user experience. Under the hood, though, Windows would actually still download and install an update for Google Chrome from Google’s own servers.

Microsoft is calling this the “Windows Update orchestration platform,” and it’s in a private preview mode for developers to experiment with ahead of a wider release.

Businesses managing fleets of PCs and home users with a single PC will all benefit from that approach. As an individual PC user, you’ll be able to check whether all your apps are up to date and update them in a single click — or maybe even no clicks. You won’t have a mess of updaters running in the background, wasting resources and requiring extra work.

And businesses will be able to manage updates for apps in a similarly streamlined way.

Of course, developers aren’t being forced to use this system, so even when the feature becomes more widely available, not every app on Windows 11 will work this way. But it’s a start. And it could represent a huge upgrade.

Better ways to update apps today

Until this new feature rolls out more widely and app developers embrace it, it’ll be the same old app updating experience on Windows 11. But there are still ways to make it less obnoxious. For example, you can use the aforementioned Winget — and not just the Winget command, but the swanky UniGetUI interface for the tool (previously named WingetUI) — to update the apps on a Windows PC.

There’s also the Microsoft Store app on Windows: If you do install an app from the Store, the Store will then automatically keep it updated. But many desktop apps are only distributed through the Store on Windows 11 the first time you install them — in other words, you can download them through the Store, but that’s it. The Store won’t update them, and the application is in charge of updating itself.

Outside of tools included with Windows, there is a collection of third-party update-checkers. Patch My PC Home Updater is free — the company also sells a solution for businesses — and it’s probably the best third-party option outside of UniGetUI. But even this tool isn’t perfect: For example, it can update “over 500 applications,” but that’s not everything on your PC.

Solutions like Patch My PC’s update tools plug a serious hole Microsoft left in Windows for decades.Chris Hoffman, Foundry

Businesses could use software such as Microsoft Intune to manage their fleet of PCs, but application updates on those PCs are a mess because there’s not one standardized way to handle the process — which is why Microsoft is changing it.

For example, with Intune, Microsoft offers its own Enterprise Application Management feature — but it only works with a specific list of apps. Businesses might also turn to manual configuration or tools like Patch My PC’s enterprise solution.

Will Windows application updates ever really be fixed?

While the new Windows Update orchestration platform seems like a big step forward, it won’t change everything overnight. Even when it is available to the wider world of Windows app developers, not everyone will plug into it immediately. Many applications may never use it at all — perhaps some app developers will prefer to do things their own way.

Does Google really want to abandon its own Chrome updater and embrace Microsoft’s built-in update experience, for example? Companies such as Google and Adobe have invested in their own updaters, which likely allow them to gather telemetry as well as handle everything in house. They’re probably not itching to abandon their proven solutions for a first-version Microsoft product. Why hand over critical infrastructure to Microsoft? At the very least, companies might wait and see for a while. And, if developer interest is low, Microsoft could axe it. However, at least those companies are already updating their own software.

Other applications (like WinRAR and 7-Zip) don’t have built-in updaters at all — although that’s a huge security concern. Will they rush to embrace a new updater? They don’t even deliver updates directly, so why take a risk? For some developers, updates represent a way to get additional page views and ad revenue from their websites.

In the future, it’s possible it’ll still be unclear which apps on your PC are even getting updated through Windows Update, which are getting updated through their own updaters, and which aren’t even bothering to check for updates at all.

Let’s hope Microsoft creates a clear user interface where Windows Update tells you which apps it’s updating — and which it isn’t. Without that, even PC geeks won’t have to worry about what’s happening on their systems.

Until then, one thing you can do is be smart about the applications you install. For example, when I wrote up my list of free downloadable upgrades to built-in Windows apps, I recommended NanaZip over 7-Zip and WinRAR because NanaZip is automatically updated through the Store. It’s a good idea to stick to a trusted list of applications that actually update themselves.

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