How best to handle multiple architectures (x64 and arm64)

[grahamrb-ed]

I'm just starting to look at using WinTuner to package up apps for our Windows estate. We have a mixed estate, mostly Windows x64 devices but with the new Microsoft Surface devices coming with arm processors we have some arm-based devices and will likely have more in the future.

My current plan is to:

1. have a separate PackageFolder for x64 and arm64 on my packaging machine
2. for each app I package I would set the -Architecture flag and -PackageFolder so that I end up with a package for each architecture
3. when deploying the packages I would then use the -OverrideAppName parameter for the arm64 packages and put (ARM) at the end of the package name
4. I'll need to separate out which devices are able to see/deploy apps based on their architecture so need to create two device groups in Intune for this

I've not thought about how to handle updates as yet.

Is the above plan the best way to handle this? Is there another option? Is there anything I've missed?

Thanks!!

[svrooij]

Great question.

Personally I was hoping to see more and more "universal" apps, but that does not seem to happen anytime soon

Here is an idea:

1. The architecture is added to the package folder structure
2. Architecture is added to the display name app (arm64)
3. Add the architecture to the Get-WtWin32App command as output

This will allow you to split out the architectures

This is just an idea, not even started building this. Accepting PR 😉

[svrooij]

@grahamrb-ed have any good ideas how you would go about this issue?

[grahamrb-ed]

My app packaging efforts have taken a back set for the last couple of months due to some other priorities. I went with my original plan in the interim although I had issues with overriding the package name.

The second problem I had was that there is no out of the box way to set up a dynamic group on Intune to separate out x64 and arm devices so I need to work on that as well. Options are to manually tag them, to use a powershell script that runs regularly to generate/update the groups, or just publish all apps to everyone and rely on the user to pick the right one.