What is the official difference between Add-AppxPackage -AppInstaller and Add-AppxPackage -AppInstallerFile?

[supertoha]

Brief description of your issue

I am trying to understand the correct and officially supported way to install MSIX packages via an .appinstaller file, especially when App Installer automatic updates are expected to work.

Currently, Windows PowerShell allows installing an AppInstaller-based package using two different commands:
Add-AppxPackage -AppInstaller "https://example.com/MyApp.appinstaller"
and
Add-AppxPackage -AppInstallerFile "https://example.com/MyApp.appinstaller"

Both commands successfully install the application, but it is not clear whether they behave identically or not.

The questions

• What is the official difference between -AppInstaller and -AppInstallerFile?
• Should both commands enable automatic updates defined in the .appinstaller file (e.g. <OnLaunch .../>)?
• Which command is recommended and supported by Microsoft for production use?

However, only -AppInstallerFile is clearly documented in Microsoft Learn, while -AppInstaller appears in some troubleshooting articles but is not fully documented.

Thank you!

[florelis]

There is no -AppInstaller parameter. The parameter name is -AppInstallerFile. But PowerShell allows you to abbreviate parameters by using only a prefix of the name, so long as it is not ambiguous. So, for example, you could also use -AppIns or -AppInstallerFi, but you couldn't use just -A because that would be ambiguous with -AllowUnsigned