Hi Graham,

I don't know what's happening here, and to my knowledge, no other customer has reported this behavior. I'm going to address your points one by one below to try to clear up any confusion whatever has happened caused.

1) If you have automatic updates disabled in the Store app, mSecure cannot update itself. The installation and update processes are handled entirely by Microsoft. mSecure cannot update itself on your computer, and in fact, even if you have automatic updates enabled for the Store, it's Microsoft that's updating the app, not mSecure. In short, mSecure does not have the capability on any platform to update itself. The best we can do is turn on a flag in our account system that tells mSecure it needs to be updated. In that case, there would be an in-app message telling you an update is required. That flag has not been initiated in some time, so that's not what happened here.

Also, even if you're not using mSecure Cloud for syncing, mSecure still communicates with our account system. Enabling Wi-Fi syncing does not mean that mSecure never contacts are servers for account purposes. It simply means that your encrypted data is never stored on our servers for the purpose of syncing.

2) The MS Store app does not need to be updated. I don't know what you mean when you say, "Apparently the Store app is very buggy." Are you saying the Microsoft Store app itself is buggy, or are you saying the mSecure app in the Microsoft Store is buggy? If you're saying the mSecure app in the Store is buggy, that's a hard one to respond to, because all I can say is that it isn't. Like any app, there are bugs that people find in the app, but as long as people bring those bugs to our attention, we always do everything we can to resolve them as quickly as possible. If you are experiencing a particular bug when you use the app, then please report it, and I'll look into it. If needed, we can get the developer involved, get logging from the app, and then fix the issue.

To be clear, what you have experienced here may or may not be a bug in mSecure. The only way we could have determined that is if I could have talked to you before the reinstall. Since the reinstall took care of the issue, it's likely that whatever was causing the issue was not a bug in mSecure, but it is definitely possible it may have been a bug. If it happens again, please let me know and I'll do some troubleshooting with you. We can try to get logging and the developer can look into his reporting tools to try and figure out what's causing the behavior. Again, if we can determine it's a bug, then we'll do everything we can to fix it as quickly as possible.

3) I don't know what you mean when you say "You might want to check what version Update is going to supply to you." Are you saying that to us or to other users? One thing to note here is that the Release Notes are behind, and I apologize for that. The newest version in the Store is 6.1.369.0, so that version is what should have been installed after you updated.

4) Since you have Wi-Fi syncing set on your account, even if something were to go wrong, after reinstalling mSecure on your PC, the app would sync in the data from mSecure on a different device. In this case, it sounds like you simply updated mSecure from the Store app, so the data stored in the app was never touched. The newer version simply installed over the top of the older version, which is the way updates always work.

5) What exactly do you mean when you say the banner pages appeared describing that the update was a major new release to 6.1? 6.1 is the newest release, so are you talking about the "What's New" views that tell you what's new in 6.1? I believe that's what you mean, but I'm not sure.

One thing to mention about how the Store app works, you cannot decide which version of an app you want to install. There is one mSecure app in the Store and when that app is updated to a new version, that is the version all of our users will get. If you have automatic updates turned off, then mSecure will stay whatever version you have installed because the app will never be automatically updated. However, if you decide to update the app, the newest version will always be installed. So if you were on 6.0.x before, after you update, the app will always be updated to the newest release which is now 6.1.369.0. This is simply how the app stores are designed to work. That it's not expected and not welcome news can't ever stop the way the app stores work, because it's not something 3rd party developers decide to implement. We, nor other developers, will ever create a new app bundle for every release we publish. If we did that, there would be hundreds of SKUs in the Store which would lead to so much confusion no one would ever download the app.

I understand you don't like that you now have the newest version of 6.1, but that's simply the way it's always going to work unless all the stores make some major change in the way they deploy 3rd party apps. In order to stay on one build, you simply cannot ever update the app, even if there is problem causing a crash. And in the event there is a problem causing a crash, we're inevitably going to ask you to update the app to fix the problem, because you will be running out of date code on your PC. In that case, it could be there is a bug in the outdated code, and the only way that bug will be able to be fixed will be to update to the newest version you don't want to install. That's simply the way app development works, and the only way to get around it is to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy to subvert a system for which the vast majority of users don't have a problem. We have no plans to work around the normal app development system in the future, so when an update to mSecure occurs, know that the latest published version will always be installed.