Ability for installed apps to query the database #5355

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Hello

I have an app which primary distribution channel is going to be the official winget-pkgs source. Its very nice. But I would love to be able for our application to be able to query if updates are available, to inform the user that they should run "winget upgrade zyx".

Ive seen that the powershell commands are able to output json and as such has a somewhat more programmatic interface - but these are not shipped with windows, as the winget-cli is.

Sorry if this functionality is already available to me and I'm just missing it :)

Proposed technical implementation details

Could be as simple as
winget show --versions --exact xyz.tool --json