"Portable" applications are, in my opinion, the absolute best way to distribute applications. They act like ye-olde desktop applications from the 80s and 90s where everything was a single self-contained object, meaning that application management was identical to regular file management. Copy them to new media to 'install', delete them to 'uninstall', run them from file shares, CDs, or USB sticks, keep them organized in folders however you want, and have multiple versions of the same application without any fancy management tools, gigantic dependency resolution databases, or third party middlemen painstakingly integrating everything.
Sadly, the world has moved away from this kind of simplicity.
Sadly, the world has moved away from this kind of simplicity.