While continuing to compete against a competitive third-party application management market for Microsoft Intune, Microsoft has continued to deliver improvements to the administrative experience for Intune admins for managing updates to applications. Most of these developments have come in the way of the Intune Suite’s Enterprise application management features, albeit still in preview and half released.
However, recently Microsoft has improved the supersedence options baked into the base product of Intune, by enabling admins to auto-update applications through supersedence, where the original application was only set to available for end users, but manually installed.
Previously if you deployed an application to your Windows devices using Microsoft Intune and marked the assignment as available, it would become available for manual installation in the user’s Company Portal app on their device. The user would then install the application. If you as the admin then deployed an updated version of the application through Microsoft Intune and utilised the supersedence feature, the application, if also marked as available, would only replace the available version in the company portal app, even if the previous version was installed.
The Auto-update feature for app supersedence ensures that if an application has been installed already, the installed version gets auto-upgraded if supported by the application.
To read more information on app supersedence, read the Microsoft documentation.
How to enable auto-upgrade for available application supersedence
This post isn’t to go through how to use the supersedence feature in Microsoft Intune app management, for that, read: Create a Supersedence relationship in Intune.
Follow the steps below to enable Auto-upgrade for your superseded applications.
1.Launch the application deployment wizard in Microsoft Intune and complete steps 1 > 6.
2. On the Assignments tab, select your available group assignments, then click No under Auto-update.
3. A pop-out window will launch where you can check the box to enable auto upgrade.
4. Complete the deployment wizard.
Auto-update scenarios and performance
It is stated clearly in the documentation for Auto-update that the device requires two check-ins to the Intune service before the device receives the auto-update for the superseding app. This means that commonly, if you do not force a device check-in, either through the portal, programmatically or from the device, it could take up to 16 hours for the device to receive the update.
If the application failed to auto-update, the current behaviour is that the update will retry indefinitely until the user initiates a manual update from the portal. When this happens, the auto-update attempts will stop.
The table below highlights specific scenarios where an application (app A) has been superseded by a newer version (app B):
| Feature | Scenario | Result |
|---|---|---|
| App A is still present on the device. | The upgrade is already triggered after first available check-in, but before app B gets installed on the device, the admin removes the relationship between app A and app B, making them independent apps. | During the second available check-in, both apps are sent down to the device and app B will be installed as an independent app. |
| Auto update setting changes | The upgrade is already triggered after first available check-in, but before app B gets installed on the device, the admin changes the auto-update setting for app B to false. | During the second available check-in, app B is sent down to the device and app A will be upgraded with app B on the device. |
| Uninstall superseded app after superseding app entities created | The upgrade is already triggered after first available check-in, but before app B gets installed on the device, the user requests an uninstall of app A and app A is removed from the device. | During the second available check-in, app B will be sent down to the device and app A will be upgraded with app B on the device. |
| Uninstall after supersedence update | App A was auto-updated to app B, but app A wasn't removed from the device. Later, the user requests an uninstall of app B from the device and app B is uninstalled successfully. | App A is still present on the device. |
| Upgrade failure | Intune attempts to auto-update app A to app B but the installation of app B failed and app A was already removed from the device. | Users won't be able to reinstall app A from the Company Portal as it’s superseded by app B, but are able to try to reinstall app B from the Company Portal. |
