Feature-based comparison of Application Virtualization and MSIX

Application Virtualization (App-V) will be end-of-life in April 2026 (see Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) support extended). As an alternative, we recommend that you look at Azure Virtual Desktop with MSIX App Attach. This article contains a side-by-side comparison of App Virtualization (App-V) and MSIX.

Compare the features of App-V and MSIX

This table compares the basic features of App-V with MSIX:

Feature	App-V	MSIX
Sharing across apps	A connection group feature in App-V groups packages together to create a virtual environment. This allows applications within that package group to interact with each other.	Shared package containers in MSIX allow IT Pros to create a shared runtime container for packaged application. This enables sharing a merged view of the virtual file system and virtual registry, thus providing access to one another's package root files and state.
Development focus	End-of-life is April 2026.	Relatively newer; introduced in 2018.
How updates are handled	App-V divides the app into 64KB blocks; however, the complete app needs to be downloaded in order to get the updates.	Only the delta (differential updates) are downloaded.
A single copy of a file across apps/users	File duplication across apps isn't avoided.	A single copy of any file is kept.
Signing	Not required	Required

For more info

Learn more about Azure Virtual Desktop at What is Azure Virtual Desktop?.

Learn more about MSIX app attach at What is MSIX app attach?.