Windows 10's new "install on my devices" Store feature

You can use the built-in Microsoft Store application of the Windows 10 operating system to install apps and games on your Windows 10 devices. Up until now, that was only possible for the active device if you used the Store directly.

All you had to do was open the Store application directly to install any app or game on the Windows 10 device. If you wanted an application to become available on all of your Windows 10 PCs, you had to run the install command from Microsoft Store on each device individually.

Microsoft launched a new feature recently that it calls "install on my devices" which unlocks remote installations of applications on the Store.

The feature is not linked to the Microsoft Store application but available when you visit a Store page in Microsoft Edge. I could not get this to work in non-Edge browsers on a system where the feature was unlocked on already.

One requirement appears to be that you need to be signed in to a Microsoft Account and not a local account to make this work.

When you open the Store page of any application or game on Microsoft's Store website, you will get the usual install/open option but also a [...] button next to it which you may activate to display the new "install on my devices" option.

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Selecting that option loads the list of Windows 10 devices that are connected to the Microsoft Account that you are signed in with.

Each Windows 10 device is listed with its name, and you can select one, some, or all of the listed devices to install the application on.

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The install now button becomes active once you selected at least one device for installation. Microsoft will push the application to the selected devices; this does not happen in real-time as it takes anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes to get the selected application to install on the target machines.

The target machine needs to be up and running for the remote install. The application will be installed the next time the machine comes online if it is powered off.

Closing Words

The new option to install apps on remote devices connected to a particular Microsoft account makes it easier to push apps or games to all Windows 10 devices connected to that account. It is a welcome feature to users who use the Microsoft Store and use multiple Windows 10 devices.