The KeePassXC team has also been trying to get their app into the store while this has happened. While this is nothing new in general, it's yet another "counterfeit" app proliferating in what's supposed to be considered a trusted source to be able to get your applications from.

This is a good example of how "app stores" tend to provide a false sense of security about what you're really downloading. There are clearly failures in terms of vetting what's there and towards ensuring that the user is actually getting what they think they're supposed to be getting.

Perhaps the "app store" model is still generally better than downloading executable code from completely random sources (nobody should be doing that), but I'm not sure there's anything more reliable (and also "secure") here than downloading a piece of software from its official source (such as from a server under the domain of the known publisher), verifying hashes/signatures, and leaving out as many intermediaries as possible who often have motives not fully aligned with the software user. Of course, this would require users to possess and be willing to use some knowledge of basic software and data hygiene, but it seems that along the way we have somewhat given up on that and so now we're stuck trusting these intermediaries usually much more than they ought to be trusted.

I think we ought to be able to have a model that suits the Windows model better which doesn't require centralisation. A piece of software running on the desktop that provides update capabilities but where each piece of software is picked up from its original site and the location is set to that site. Somewhat like the Ubuntu repository model but without the multiple steps just an installer that installs the common updater tool if needed, registers itself and then this works for all over software too that buys into the model. It should be fairly cheap to run such a tool since the bandwidth is for all the different software tools and completely common features are available to everything. Its just the updater with some standards for implementing software updates without a store.

`winget upgrade —-all` from a command line (assuming your Windows is reasonably up-to-date, otherwise, https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli to get the latest release manually)