has anyone distributed a Windows app? I am confused towards how to do it? Is it a matter of creating...

# compose-desktop

[Alex Styl]

has anyone distributed a Windows app? I am confused towards how to do it? Is it a matter of creating an exe or MSI package and then signing it?

[Arkadii Ivanov]

Not sure about Microsoft Store, but a downloadable installer is pretty easy - https://github.com/arkivanov/MVIKotlin/blob/d36b55ef4980dcb579956b42baf449d905e06f0e/.github/workflows/package-time-travel-app.yml#L50

[mikehearn]

The built in compose tasks can help create an MSI or EXE using jpackage, but you won't get online updates with that.

[spierce7]

MSI is a pretty miserable route. I'm doing that currently, however I'm going to upgrade to MSIX

[mikehearn]

@spierce7 btw since we last talked, Conveyor has a new option for a different (forced) update UX. In aggressive mode, every time the app starts, it grabs a small metadata.properties file from the update site and if it's out of date it triggers a synchronous update with no user interaction required. So you can ensure the user is staying up to date with protocol changes between frontend/backend (well you'd need to detect the running app is out of date and restart). And as you know it does MSIX.

[spierce7]

What if they never shut down the app?

[mikehearn]

Same as for a web app. You can get users who leave the tab open with those too. The usual approach is to add a client version to server requests, and if the client is out of date the server returns an error that the client recognizes as meaning "i'm out of date". Then it can restart.

[Alex Styl]

@Arkadii Ivanov don’t people get a warning that the app is from an unrecognized developer this way?

[Arkadii Ivanov]

@Alex Styl As far as I remember - they do. That's a valid point. But this works for my specific use case.

[Abdelilah El Aissaoui]

Personally I use Inno setup for a classical install wizard. You can configure it easily and the users are familiar with the UI

[Alex Styl]

thanks for sharing @Abdelilah El Aissaoui. I found out about Inno the other day. Looked too old and I was curious of people still use it. Will have a look when I get the chance 👍

[Abdelilah El Aissaoui]

It matches well the System UI and quite modern. Google results is full of the old UI sadly, take a look at these screenshots

[Alex Styl]

that looks great

[Alex Styl]

@Abdelilah El Aissaoui do you somehow sign the installer? I am wondering so that end users don’t see any ‘unrecognized developer’ when they use the app

[Abdelilah El Aissaoui]

No, unfortunately the cost of a certificate is way too high for an open source side project

[Alex Styl]

really cool. had a look at it. there’s even a command line way of packaging the app and a way to sign it

[Abdelilah El Aissaoui]

Yeah, it's very flexible 😄