Microsoft Store to Offer Direct App Downloads on the Web

The Microsoft Store has long been available in web and Windows versions, and never the twain shall meet. Well, the twain have met: And you can now download Windows apps directly from the web version of the Store for the first time. (Or, will be able to soon. I’m still not seeing this new experience.)

“We’ve just launched Microsoft Store installers for web – A new and streamlined way to install Store apps directly from apps.microsoft.com,” Microsoft’s Rudy Huyn tweeted last night. (Right. There’s no official announcement, and this arrived in the middle of a weekend.) “We built an undocked version of the Store using the same logic and code as the larger app, managing prerequisites, entitlements, downloads, and installations in the same way. However, this time, it was packaged in a much smaller and undocked executable.”

Previously, you could find app landing pages in the Microsoft Store on the web—I’ve done this a lot via web search—but when you clicked the “Install” button, it would launch the native Microsoft Store app. In recent years, this app would appear in a special mini-window that made it feel a bit more streamlined. But now it’s been literally streamlined: When you click that “Install” button, Huyn says, the app just downloads through the browser, using the normal Downloads feature.

According to Huyn, this mini-window involved too many clicks—among other things, it required a second “Install” menu to ensure that the download request came from a human and not a malicious script—and so Microsoft experimented internally for five months to come up with something better.

And it does seem better, I guess: The new “undocked” app download experience requires fewer clicks, uses a lightweight installer that’s much faster than the full Microsoft Store app experience, is always up-to-date, always works, and supports multiple simultaneous downloads. So yeah, after first launching this store in 2012 as the Windows Store, it appears that Microsoft has finally figured out how to let customers download apps … from the web.

It’s science!