Windows installer for App store support
I just came across this system in another project I follow, and I think it could be interesting to explore this as a possible update to the windows packaging. This is more of a discussion issue to track people's thoughts on this - since this is a lot of work and I know I don't have the Windows experience to do it.
Microsoft has released a new package format called MSIX (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/overview) and AppInstaller (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/app-installer/app-installer-root), which is supposed to provide a better user experience for Windows software installers and updates to programs, as well as being the format that apps packaged on the appstore use. It looks like these package formats will support auto-updating of the installed application as well. Unfortunately, NSIS doesn't seem to natively support MSIX, but it appears that there is a MSIX Packaging Tool that can analyze any existing installer and try to build an appropriate MSIX package for it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/packaging-tool/create-app-package.
The main issue currently is these formats are Windows 10 only, so we would still need to maintain the old installers for the older Windows versions.
The full MSIX help pages are here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/