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The winget "App Installer" app on the MS Store has a publisher called "Microsoft Windows". This publisher has no profile and no other published apps. As a result, it ticks all the boxes for phishing/impersonation. Would it be possible for winget ("App Installer") to be published using the official "Microsoft Corporation" publisher account? |
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This is something that has actually bothered me for quite a while. Lol It seems like it's purposely obfuscated in order to keep certain "System Components" published by Microsoft from being directly searchable on the web or the app. In order to do this, they would need a different publisher account that also is un-searchable, or you could just circumvent by searching for the "organization". One can only surmise that this is to protect users in some way, if indeed this was the intention. I've also thought about this a crazy amount of times as you can tell and could be completely off base 😂 Winget will find "app installer" however from the CLI, which is confusing to how that works lol
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The "App Installer" is considered to be part of Windows. It's not something a user would necessarily need to "install" / "uninstall" which is why it's not intended to be searchable via the Microsoft Store. This is a policy decision made outside of the team developing WinGet. There is a community repository that is included with WinGet by default (as long as no Group Policy prevents it). The community repository is one of the places where newer versions of WinGet are published as a convenience to make it easier to get the latest version of WinGet installed which is why it would show up in a WinGet search. |
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For the specific question about the publisher account: All Microsoft "apps" that are considered a "System Component" in Windows are published with the "Microsoft Windows" account. You can see this in the Microsoft Store by going to the "Library" page. For example, the Store itself is also published by Microsoft Windows. As Demitrius said, it is a policy decision outside of WinGet. |
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I see that other components like "WebP Image Extension", "AV1 Video Extension", "Phone Link", etc. are also published under "Microsoft Windows". I'm guessing that it's used for components intended for future inclusion in the Windows install. |
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¯_ (ツ)_/¯ |
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afaik, Phone Link has been included in Windows 11 for a few versions now |
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The "App Installer" is considered to be part of Windows. It's not something a user would necessarily need to "install" / "uninstall" which is why it's not intended to be searchable via the Microsoft Store. This is a policy decision made outside of the team developing WinGet. There is a community repository that is included with WinGet by default (as long as no Group Policy prevents it). The community repository is one of the places where newer versions of WinGet are published as a convenience to make it easier to get the latest version of WinGet installed which is why it would show up in a WinGet search.