UniGetUI – Keep (Almost) All Your Apps Up to Date Automatically

So many apps. So many updates.

It’s common advice to keep your system and all your installed applications as up to date as possible. Windows Update takes care of Windows and many of its apps, as well as other Microsoft apps like Microsoft Office.

But what about everything else?

The reality is a mishmash of applications that install update checkers that run all the time, apps that check for updates each time you run them, apps that check for updates every so often as you run them, and, of course, apps that don’t check for updates at all.

UniGetUI is a great solution for all that.

Keeping your apps up to date with UniGetUI

UniGetUI makes it easy to keep almost all your apps updated in one place. Instead of juggling lots of update tools, it gathers everything into one list and updates them with a click. It runs in the background, alerts you when updates are ready, and saves you time and hassle.

Origins of UniGetUI

There’s no central repository of applications for Windows. The Microsoft Store is a start, but it’s nowhere near complete. You probably have applications installed from a variety of sources around the internet.

Microsoft created1 a command-line tool and infrastructure called “WinGet” to address this. It’s already installed in your Windows 10 or 11 PC.

WinGet is essentially a large database of information about Windows applications, where they live, how they’re versioned, and what one needs to do to install, uninstall, or update them.

Run “winget list” in a command prompt, and you’ll get a list of all the apps installed on your machine that WinGet knows about (which is most, these days).

The problem, though, is that WinGet is a command-line tool. It works, it’s handy, and it solves a needed problem, but it’s a little much for the average user.

UniGetUI is, in a sense, a graphical user interface wrapper for WinGet — plus more2.

Installing UniGetUI

While UniGetUI has an official website (shown at the top of the page), it’s easy to install from the Microsoft Store. Search for unigetui.

Click on Install, and the tool will be downloaded and installed. Click on Open to run it.

UniGetUI: Listing your installed apps

Click on the computer icon in the left-hand pane for a list of all the apps UniGetUI “knows about” that are installed on your machine.

You can scroll through this list to explore what you have. You can also right-click on any item you find for more information, as well as a few actions you can take on that item. Of course, be sure you know what will happen before making any changes. For example, uninstalling a recognized application is one thing, but uninstalling things you’re not sure of could cause problems later.

As you’ll see, it’s a long list. It’s probably the best inventory of what’s installed that I’ve seen to date.

UniGetUI: Updating your installed apps

Click on the update icon in the left pane, and the list of applications will be filtered to those with available updates.

In the example above, you can see several updates are available on my machine. In this example, I could rely on each of those update mechanisms happening independently.

• Microsoft OneDrive – which could be updated by Windows Update the next time it runs.
• Microsoft Teams – which could be updated by Windows Update the next time it runs.
• Mozilla Thunderbird – which could be updated either by its resident update service, or it would notify me of an available update the next time it runs.
• TreeSize Free – which would notify me of an available update the next time it runs.

However, the first time you run UniGetUI, you’re likely to have a long list of available updates.

Click on Update selection, and all of them will be updated immediately. The updates are run sequentially, one after the other. Some may require that you confirm a UAC prompt. When complete, your applications will be up to date.

UniGetUI: automation

Once installed, UniGetUI runs a small program in the background to monitor for updates.

Every so often, you will get a notification from UniGetUI that one or more apps have updates available. You can choose to dismiss that notification, or you can instruct it to install all available updates. You can also click on the notification icon to open the program and choose to update manually.

You may be surprised at how often software is updated. I’m an extreme case, of course; my list of applications has 273 entries on my primary computer. But even my “simple” example machine shown here has 95. It’s rare that a day goes by without one or more of those applications having an available update.

It’s your choice, of course: update every time, wait until a few have accumulated, or turn UniGetUI’s notifications off completely and just fire it up periodically to run a manual check on your own schedule.

UniGetUI: failures

I’ve been running UniGetUI for several months. Shortly after I installed it, I realized that it was having difficulty with one application. The attempt to update that app would never succeed from within UniGetUI.

One of the right-click options is to have UniGetUI ignore that specific package.

This particular app does a fine job of updating itself regularly, so rather than try to track down a solution, I just told UniGetUI to ignore it.

Out of the 273 items in my list, that’s the only one I’ve had an issue with. I don’t know if the issue is the program’s, UniGetUI’s, or if it’s something about my system. As I said, I didn’t bother to explore further.

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