Two days ago there was an update for both the XBox Music and Video, but there is a problem with these updates. I first got wind of the issues with these apps from Tom Warren of the Verge that his Music App install was botched, that this may be one of the reason why MS didn’t want to release Win8.1 RTM till October. I and some others were advising him to try to cleanup his install via Powershell commands.

Well, today was my turn to install these updates on my mint Windows 8.1 RTM install, and what do you know, got the same error as Tom, the result of which you can see above. But unlike Tom, I was able to continue using these apps despite update failure. So this got me thinking what went wrong and I started investigating. Well, I have the proof, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you nor with Microsoft, it is just a culmination of circumstances and their timing.

See, Win8.1RTM was released to us public two days ago and some us got cracking, installing these OS immediately, it was the same day that the Update came out by omission or commission of Microsoft in this case. Those updates were released for compatibility reasons, timed with the latest version of the Built-In version of these apps in Win8.1RTM, but the update wasn’t meant for Win8.1RTM, it was meant for Win8.1Preview! As you can see from below screenshots, the version of music app before and after the update on Win8.1P:

And the following is the version that came with Win8.1RTM:

As you can see, the version that came with Windows 8.1 RTM is one node higher than what we had in the Preview OS. Since the update was released for the 2.1.X.X series, you cannot update the built-in version of RTM with a lower version. It is just sad that MS did not catch this discrepancies and prevent the RTM version from declaring availability of a lower version.

Conclusion:
If you have RTM version of Windows 8, you can neglect those updates till a few weeks when MS will have a chance to streamline the versions. You are not missing much anyway. I hope this clears up the air for a lot of you folks. We will update the post when all is aligned again.