Recently, Microsoft announced that they have rescinded the deprecation of the App-V Sequencer and App-V Client. In a related article, it was stated that App-V will still not be actively developed, meaning there will be no new features added to the product, but it may continue to receive security bug fixes as required. App-V Management Server, App-V Publishing Server and Reporting Services will still go end of life in April 2026.
While there currently is no end-of-life date set for App-V, it will eventually reach end of life, requiring migration to something else. As Jim Moyle of Microsoft recently stated, customers are encouraged to still actively pursue use of a modern alternative now.
I’ve had some peers voice excitement about deprecation being delayed. While App-V is one of my favorite subjects, what is there to be excited about? Continuing to use a product that has not been actively developed or received new features for many years? An excuse to keep limping along with the technology that by Microsoft’s own admission is in “keep the lights on” mode?
We All Need to be Thinking Bigger Than App-V
At Numecent, we know from talking to customers that many organizations have App-V packages in their estate. In fact, one of our most popular App-V related blog posts over the last 12 months is one targeted at organizations who have App-V packages but no longer have personnel that knows how to manage the format. Many App-V customers have been in a bind, they heard they needed to get away from App-V but had no idea how. We have heard from customers they tried to convert to MSIX but discovered many of their App-V packages did not work in the MSIX format.
Take advantage of the luxury of time provided by delaying end of life, but do not lull yourself into a false sense of security to simply find yourself in the same situation a few years down the line. With Windows 10 end of support in October 2025, now is the perfect time to execute your modernization initiatives.
Like I have said numerous times, I love App-V. It has been a massive part of my life and career but App-V has had its day and frankly it has been long since surpassed as a solution. It’s time for a modern solution that solves for all your existing App-V use cases –such as virtualising and isolating legacy applications, delivering applications side by side with overlapping or conflicting configurations, executing scripts at various trigger points, and dynamic application delivery – while gaining capabilities you never had with the solution.
Many organisations only achieved 60% to 80% compatibility using App-V, despite continuous efforts to reach full virtualization coverage. . These same orgs are now stuck with App-V packages they don’t know how to manage with packaging team members moving onto other companies and vendors transitioning to new solutions.
Thus, the rate of compatibility and ease of use are critical as you forge ahead. Solutions requiring a lot of remediation work will be dead on arrival.
Thinking Bigger
Start with how your application management solution influences the agility of your organization. While App-V has been available to organizations for almost 20 years, it has not been successful in supporting all applications in an enterprise.
Containerization is key to maximizing application compatibility, performance, security, and cost-efficiency. To achieve truly modern application management, you need a single solution to support all physical and virtual Windows desktop and multi-cloud environments. Moreover, it should be intuitive so team veterans and newcomers alike can easily adopt the solution and execute their day-to-day responsibilities in a secure and compliant manner.
You should be able to orchestrate applications faster than you can provision new AVD or Windows 365 desktops. It doesn’t do your organization any good if it takes 30+ minutes for apps to deploy or when app updates require hours of repackaging and image management work.
The days of installing applications into desktop images, whether for physical or virtual desktops, have to be left in the past. Application containers enable you to dynamically provision applications directly to your employees. This means getting to the nirvana of a single lightweight golden image. No more cracking open a virtual desktop image, installing an application or application update, sysprepping the image and then reprovisioning your desktops with that new image.
The days of using deployment solutions that take anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours to deliver applications also need to be in the past. It is simply unacceptable for enterprises to initiate an application update without knowing when that update might complete and thats if the update even completes successfully! This is not what IT should be in this day and age.
How Numecent Applies
That said, all of this can be achieved while maintaining your existing investments in App-V – eliminating months of repackaging efforts. With our Cloudpager platform, we automatically convert App-V packages into our Cloudpaging application container format – instantly maximizing performance, compatibility, and reporting capabilities. For the apps you haven’t been able to package with App-V, Cloudpaging can get them handled. Customers of ours like Waterman have successfully packaged more than 98% of their desktop applications – extending DevOps capabilities to the management of their applications across all modern Windows desktop environments.
Cloudpaging provides all features and functionality you know and love from App-V, like isolation, but takes things a much further step forward by offering a far more granular control over what to integrate to or isolate. This maximizes compatibility and interoperability with other applications, plugins, drivers, printers, COM+ services, and more. Better yet, it eliminates the need for chaining application dependencies in Connection Groups. You can also virtualize plug-ins like Office add-ins without a need for using a custom command with a parameter similar to the app v parameter in App-V and without the need for something like the run virtual registry setting.
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