Is it possible to programmatically update a Windows Store app (when in Kiosk mode)?

Question

I've found the following question asking whether it's possible to find out whether an app update is available:

Programmatically check Windows Store App update

(Not my primary question, but is there a better way?)

I know that it's possible to configure Windows 8.1 to auto-update apps, but this doesn't always happen as soon as I want.

So, now I know that an update is available, can I trigger the update from within the app?

If so, would this trigger have to take me through the Windows Store (which won't be possible in my scenario as I'm running in kiosk mode) or can it just start the auto-update?

Any thoughts/ideas on how I might be able to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I've run into this problem as well.

What you can do is to check to see if there is an update available, then notify your users that they can either wait or update manually (through the Windows Store app, which you can open for them). You can also notify them of the importance level of the update (just UI fixes/additional features or is it a critical security patch?).

Lastly, you can also register the users for toast updates via an Azure Notification Hub, then send out a toast notification about it.

If it's truly critical, you can also include code in your app to do something like lock down unless it's fully updated or something similar.

In my experience, as of right now, these are our only options. Maybe one day they'll allow us to force an update via a Background Worker or something while the app isn't running. As of right now, that's not an option though.