danx299/simdrop

SimDrop is a Windows desktop app that installs mods for Microsoft Flight Simulator, both the 2020 and 2024 versions, by drag and drop. You take a downloaded mod file in zip, rar, or 7z format and drop it onto the SimDrop window, and it finds your Community folder automatically, whether the simulator was installed through the Microsoft Store or Steam, extracts the mod into it correctly, and deletes the previous version of that mod first so no old files linger. Doing this by hand is fiddly: you have to unzip the archive yourself, watch out for mods that end up nested inside an extra folder, and remember to remove the earlier version before copying the new one in. SimDrop handles all three steps automatically. It looks for the mod's layout.json file to figure out the correct folder to extract, so it never creates a doubled up folder inside Community, and it also checks that no file in the archive tries to write outside the target folder, a basic security protection sometimes called Zip Slip. The app is a portable Windows program built with WPF on .NET 8 in C#, using the SharpCompress library to read the various archive formats, and it does not require administrator rights to run. Its only stored setting is the path to your Community folder, saved locally on your machine, and the author states plainly that there is no telemetry, no account, and no ads. Each release also links to a VirusTotal scan and a published checksum so you can verify the download yourself. To install SimDrop, you download and run the setup executable from the releases page. Because the app is not yet code signed, Windows SmartScreen may warn you the first time, and you click through to run it anyway. It checks GitHub Releases on launch to let you know about updates. If you want to build it yourself instead, the project needs the .NET 8 SDK, and building the installer itself needs a separate tool called Inno Setup. The whole project is released under the MIT license, the same license used by its one external dependency.