Yeah, I’m not sure how things have changed more recently. Initially, the idea was that enterprises would have a “private” Store where they’ve [bulk] added apps for their people to use. In this world, side-loading (“download this .msix”) was banned by default, because it’s exactly that shadow IT that the people who are paying say they want to avoid.
As of Windows 11, I’m pretty sure side-loading is enabled for everyone by default provided the MSIX is properly signed (which ours are). I assume this extends into Windows Enterprise (if anyone wants to test this, you should be able to download the sideloadable 3.13.0 MSIXs from here[1] and double-click python-3.13.0-amd64.msix).
Future work might include making a regular installer (probably with no configuration options) containing whatever launcher/manager we build, but I don’t want to start there. It’ll scare too many people if we say we’re replacing the old installer completely - I only want to improve the Store experience right now, and people who can’t access the Store won’t see anything change (yet).
Apologies for the size, the only unauthenticated download option is “all the MSIX files at once”. Only the file I named is expected to work - the others probably won’t, but we don’t care. ↩︎