How to distribute the UWP Enterprise application

Question

Our company is developing the Universal Platform Platform application (Windows 10), which we want to distribute in the "Enterprise". We do not want to publish it through the Windows Store. In the normal case, the devices are uncontrollable (“bring your own device”).

In Windows Phone 8, we signed our applications with a Mobile Enterprise certificate, which we purchased from Symantec. Then we distributed the file along with the registration token. The installation was two-stage and quite simple. I did not find something that says that this can be applied to a UWP application.

Is there a similar thread for UWP for Windows 10 Mobile?

What I tried: I found with the right mouse button, Store, Create App Packages ... in Visual Studio to create a package with the appx extension. I also read that you have to enable Sideload apps in the Settings section of your phone. But how to get the package for installation on the phone by air?

Just trying to download the appx file from the web server does not work. (Just downloaded the file and did not know how to open it.)

Answer 1

We deploy ours through our private section in the Microsoft business store at https://businessstore.microsoft.com/en-us/

Just enter the business store and invite the developer account that you used to create the application for publishing LOB applications.

After the invitation, the developer can choose that the application will only be displayed in your private store when they are published, in addition to just publishing any application in the Windows storage.

Answer 2

We do this by providing side loading and using a PowerShell script to install. In our scenario, all devices are connected to a domain, and we can use Config Manager to deploy the application.

In PowerShell, we use the following command to remove

 $app = get-appxpackage -Name My.UWP.App if($app -ne $NULL) {remove-appxpackage $app.PackageFullName} 

To install, you need to make sure that the certificate is installed

certutil.exe -addstore TrustedPeople $ CertificatePath

Then use the Add-AppxPackage command to install the application.

Add-AppxPackage -Path [package path] -DependencyPath [path dependencies] -ForceApplicationShutdown

Answer 3

The newly introduced MSIX package format can be a bailout.
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/overview

You can think of it as an appx or setup.exe file. Appx can also be packaged in MSIX format.

For me, Advanced Installer provides a good experience for creating a package.

Please note that Microsoft has released the official MSIX repackaging tool. This is repackaging, not packaging. This means that the tool requires a single packed file.
- MSIX Packaging Tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/msix-packaging-tool/9n5lw3jbcxkf?activetab=pivot:overviewtab