How Per-Machine Windows Apps Silently Auto-Update — Three Patterns Learned from Chrome, Slack, and VS Code

Per-user auto-update is straightforward. The moment you try silent auto-update on a per-machine install, without a UAC prompt for a standard user, the problem becomes hard. This post reads across how Chrome, Slack, VS Code, Docker Desktop, and others actually solve it, and reduces those implementations to three patterns: an Omaha-style SYSTEM service, MSIX platform delegation, and MDM redistribution.