App Center 1.0.14

App Center now reads from winget's own engine where a winget process was the slow part: an app's page opens in milliseconds, the refresh after every operation is a second faster, and an app's icon comes from its manifest when the publisher put one there.

• An app's page from winget's COM API. The publisher, description, homepage and the rest of what winget show prints are read through the Windows Package Manager COM API: the same engine as winget.exe, in a server process of its own, where an exact lookup takes milliseconds against a quarter of a second for a winget process. Search hits are enriched the same way. What the API says is written out the way winget show prints it and read by the same parser, so the page sees one vocabulary whichever answered. When the API cannot answer, winget.exe is asked as before.
• A faster refresh. The update check behind the sidebar count, the Manage page and the Installed / Update chip on every card goes through the API as well, beside the winget list and winget pin list that stay. On the machine it was built on the refresh went from 2.1 s to 1.3 s. A blocking or gating pin made in a terminal sends the check back to winget upgrade, since those change what winget offers.
• Icons from the manifest. A winget manifest may declare the app's icon, and about a third do. That icon, as its publisher submitted it, now comes ahead of the homepage in the hunt. So that it reaches machines that cached their icons under the old rules, the first launch of this build clears the icon cache once of everything written before 19 October 2026, and the pages hunt their icons afresh.
• One-off patches. That clearing is the first lightweight patch: a change a new build makes once to what an older one left on disk, recorded by name in %LOCALAPPDATA%\AppCenter\patches.json. A patch that fails is tried again at the next launch.
• Microsoft.Management.Deployment.winmd ships beside the exe. 64 KB of type metadata under the MIT licence, the file App Installer itself carries, which Windows needs to marshal calls into winget's server from a process without a package identity. Listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

Downloads

• AppCenter-1.0.14-Setup.exe — per-user installer, no admin rights needed; installs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime if it is missing
• AppCenter-1.0.14-Setup.exe.sha256 — its SHA-256, which copies of App Center check before updating themselves
• AppCenter-1.0.14-portable.zip — unzip and run (needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime)