Consider publishing to the Windows Store

Hey, I’ve been using Caprine for a long time on Windows and really enjoy it. It’d be nice to see it in the Windows Store where we could easily download it without looking up this GitHub repo and downloading the exe.

This doesn’t require many changes, just installing electron-windows-store and configuring the script/certs. I’ve got this running in a fork already and haven’t had any problems building the appx, but wanted to open an issue here to get your thoughts on this before submitting a pull request.

Some of the benefits you get from converting to an appx and publishing on the Windows Store:

• A more convenient install experience. It’s easier (imo) to just press “Install App” in the store instead of finding this repo and downloading/installing the exe.
• A nicer uninstall experience. When uninstalling an exe you have to open the control pane first, then find the program in the list of all other programs and press uninstall. With an app you can just uninstall it straight from the start menu. Compare the install/uninstall process of an exe with an appx.
• Built-in update experience.
• Windows Store apps are cleaned up after uninstall and don’t leave behind data/registry tweaks like an exe might.

Some downsides, to be fair:

• This requires building on a Windows machine with the Win10 SDK installed.
• I’m not sure if this is still a requirement, but at one point a developer had to fill out this form before submitting an Electron app to the store.
• The Windows Store has a web API to help automate releases, but it seems to require an Azure Active Directory integration. 🙄

To be clear I’m not suggesting support for Xbox, HoloLens or the now dead Windows Phone; this is still an Electron app and won’t run on those platforms anyway. This is solely about the convenience of installing the app from the Windows Store.

[sindresorhus]

Sure. No problem at all. This is open source. The more people that get access to it, the better. I’m happy to link to it too if you can commit to keeping it up to date.

[nozzlegear]

@CvX I’ve actually unpublished the app from the Windows Store this morning, at the request of @sindresorhus.

Sorry to everyone who’s been using it, I simply haven’t had the time to keep up with upstream changes and never found a great way to automate publishing to the Windows Store. If anyone wants to try their hand at it, check out the appx.ps1 file in my fork of Caprine, it should have enough info to get you started.