Microsoft takes on Ninite with easy batch multi-app installations

Microsoft has quietly begun to challenge Ninite with an interesting addition to the Microsoft Store: multi-app installations that are as simple as a few clicks. Interestingly, the new option doesn’t seem to be available via the Microsoft Store application within Windows. Instead, Windows Central found it tucked away on the Microsoft Store website,

Ninite has been around practically forever: PCWorld reviewed Ninite years ago in 2012, and we recently highlighted it again this year as a superb tool for resetting your PC and quickly getting it back up and running with common apps after a fresh start.

In short, Ninite allows you to pick from a suite of third-party apps and combine them into a single batch installer that steps through and installs all of them in one go. The winget command within Windows is vaguely similar, though that’s more for users who want to avoid the Microsoft Store entirely and grab an a-la-carte app via the command line.

Microsoft’s multi-app installation challenges Ninite in their format, though they still cater to the Store’s suite of apps. Microsoft carves out six categories of eight apps apiece, divided into “personalization,” “social,” “creativity,” and the like. Apps include everything from Adobe Acrobat to EarTrumpet to Lively Wallpaper, with an emphasis on apps (not games) that you’d probably like to add to your PC.

The multi-app installation page allows you to select apps via checkboxes, where they’ll collect in a “selected apps” column to the right. Once you’re happy with your selections, you can choose to download the installer, which will show up in the Downloads section of File Explorer.

Oddly, there’s no way to click through and see what each app actually does or how much space it’ll take up on your PC.

Don’t expect too much magic here. The “installer” is essentially a macro that tells the Microsoft Store to download the apps you’ve selected. It’s not much different than actually going to the Microsoft Store, looking up the app, and then clicking the “Download” button multiple times. As you can see in the screenshot below, the Microsoft Store does check for dependencies this way, but that’s something it always does anyway:

What the multi-app installation page does, however, is curate quality apps Microsoft thinks you’ll like, which is always a useful thing.

I’ve been told that Microsoft was sensitive to users ditching Windows in favor of the Apple Mac ecosystem, especially in the waning days of Windows 10 support. That’s one reason Microsoft has been pushing its Windows backup and restore strategy so hard: backing up your files to the cloud helps keep you in the Windows ecosystem. (Backing up your files also earns you an additional year of Windows 10 support.)

For now, Microsoft doesn’t have a way of “saving” your multi-app bundle to the Store itself. Microsoft’s Restore functionality will automatically “restore” apps on your PC that you downloaded from the Store, but doesn’t offer that third-party capability that Ninite does. It seems unlikely that Microsoft will point you to “untrusted” third-party apps that it can’t vet, meaning Ninite may retain an advantage there.