[hypercube33]

I see two main camps of modern application installers, if you want to call them modern. one is Squirrel which is userland based (Microsoft Teams, Spotify, Slack irrc use this) and it's all but impossible to deal with as an admin.

the other camp is Omaha which chrome uses (along with Edge) and runs as a service to handle updates and install.

Neither of these handle the actual problem but push it down the road a bit - you'll find .exe and .MSI installers for both flavors of these applications (usually a boot strap to install the updater and then have that install the application)

I think one push for userland installers was that "you don't need admin" and to some developers it feels like the right place to install an app (user profiles) however I absolutely agree, this makes it a nightmare to deal with as an admin for windows devices.

I really do not like how squirrel handles updates since it feels like any app that uses it you have an in-your-face update experience vs. Omaha where it does background updates and you typically have no idea as a user anything even happened.

As far as code signing I went on a tangent one day trying to figure out why most code isn't signed and I think it's just too expensive and or complicated for developers not forced to be in a position to actually need it - enterprise or an app store requiring it.

[alkonaut]

Squirrel doesn’t have any installation gui or specific process. It downloads and installs version N+1 in the background. Next start will run that version. Any decision to show even a notification that this happened is entirely up to the developer. I think it’s even near impossible to show an “installer” in the traditional sense for the initial install. You can show a splash at initial install that’s it. As far as userland installers go they are all (almost by definition) the same in the end