Why push apps out to user desktops and VMs when you can pull them in? PullApps is a small agent that you can deploy with desktops to deliver virtual and the new container based application packages without a big clunky back-end server and even more management consoles.  Perfect for labs, and non-persistent and semi-persistent environments like VDI, RDS, and AVD. Also great for persistent deployments to physical or cloud based desktops.

To better support multi-user operating systems, PullApps configuration is all under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.  This also prevents standard users from changing the configuration, which is important to protect against unauthorized application usage.

PullApps may be configured to log Event Trace for Windows style events into the events log.  This may be configured during installation or via regedit after installation (See additional articles for these).

PullApps can work with Active Directory for application assignments if you want.

PullApps can work with Azure Active Directory (now known as Entra ID) for application assignments if you want.

Some questions and answers (FAQ) on PullApps.

PullApps includes an option to install a GUI application on the end-user system in addition to the PullApps Service.  This application allows the end-user to self administer applications on demand.

PullApps uses a Windows Service in order to perform all of the actions needed to deploy the applications without the end-user needing administrative or elevated rights.

An overview of PullApps, a free alternative application distribution tool.

Automatic or Self-Selected Distribution of App-V, AppX, and MSIX packages.