Mercury: Manifest Modifications

As you may have seen by now, the new console-store app revamp has been making its rounds, so I figured I’d instruct those who wish to install the app for themselves.

Starting off, extract the zip to a location of your choosing, as we’re gonna tweak a few things within the folder in order to bypass the initial upgrade screen.

  1. Delete the AppxSignature.p7x file as we’re going to be sideloading this.
  2. Open up the AppxManifest.xml file, and either add a new line, or modify the current device family value such as: Name=”Windows.Xbox” to Name=”Windows.Universal”
  3. Drop down to line 24, starting with: <uap:VisualElements — at the end of this line, you’ll see the following element: AppListEntry=”none” — remove this element
  4. Jump down to the capabilities section, and remove all of the <wincap:* entries
Alternatively, if you'd like to keep the wincaps, you can add the regkey found here

Once you've performed these steps, open a powershell window in your current working directory, and register it: Add-AppxPackage -register .\AppxManifest.xml

With the app installed, there's several ways of launching it. Lets go through each one:

  • Start Menu > App List > Scroll down until you find:
  • Win+R > shell:AppsFolder > find and launch Mercury. Within this you can also right click & create a shortcut.
  • Visual Studio > Debug > Other Debug Targets > Scroll down until you find Mercury.
  • Windows Device Portal.

For convenience sake, I’ve provided an appx you can simply install without having to do any modifications yourself, which you can find here — simply unzip the appx, and perform the PowerShell command above. Alternatively, you could self-sign the appx for easier sideloading as well, and use something like the App Installer.

If you happen to have mindeployappx from an IoT Core image on-hand, you can use its SkipSignatureValidation switch as such:

mindeployappx.exe /Add /PackagePath:C:\path\to\consolestore.appx /DeploymentOption:32768