Summary
Windows Update is a pretty good resource for keeping your PC up to date, but updating the rest of your programs and apps on your computer can be a bit more of a toss-up—there’s no reliable centralized update solution for your apps. Microsoft wants Windows Update to be able to help with that, too.
Microsoft is working on a new update orchestration platform designed to streamline and unify the update process for apps, drivers, and system components on Windows. Windows Update currently delivers OS updates, security updates, and the occasional critical driver update. But most of the apps on your computer, unless you grabbed them from the Microsoft Store, either have their own self-updating mechanisms or require you to manually update them. This orchestrator will, in essence, open up Windows Update for developers who would like to distribute updates via Microsoft’s update mechanism.
This is currently in a private preview stage, but once it’s actually out, it will provide developers and IT product teams with a centralized system for managing their software updates alongside regular Windows updates. “Updates across the Windows ecosystem can feel like a fragmented experience,” Microsoft stated. “To solve this, we’re building a vision for a unified, intelligent update orchestration platform capable of supporting any update (apps, drivers, etc.) to be orchestrated alongside Windows updates.”
One advantage of this new system is intelligent scheduling. The orchestrator is designed to queue downloads and start updates at optimal times. This process will take into account various factors, including current CPU load, network bandwidth usage, user activity, the device’s power status (e.g., on battery or plugged in), and overall network conditions. With this, Windows would download any pending updates with minimal interruption to your daily workflow. I would wager there’s a degree of machine learning in here to determine what time that is, and it would presumably involve Windows analyzing how you use your PC on a daily basis before this actually kicks in.
The main advantage, however, is a more consistent experience. Windows Update is pretty good at actually getting OS updates on users' PCs, so it wants to take that same philosophy to the rest of your apps. This is a problem Microsoft has been trying to fix for a while. One recent approach included making the Microsoft Storeable to deliver updates to appseven if they weren’t downloaded from the Store. But this approach still required apps to be published there anyway, and a lot of developers don’t really care for it a lot. This would still require developers to opt into distributing updates through Windows Update, but hopefully it’s something that catches on more.
