Prompting user to update a Windows Store app

[Eric Grange 3]

I have been looking without success for ways to prompt the user to update an app published as appx to the Windows Store, outside of making checks to my own website.

Anyone having any success with the Windows Store API ? The reason is that I have found that the Windows Store rarely checks for updates on its own, on many user machines, opening the Windows Store app and manually checking for updates revealed they were months behind (and this include Microsoft's own apps)... This was the case on Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines.

So I suspect that without an in-app update prompt mechanism, many users aren't and won't see updates. But it feels a bit odd having to check for updates through a parallel mechanism, and then having to redirect the user to the store via a ShellExecute....