According to VMware, the product has a success rate of about 90–95% in packaging applications.

[4] ThinApp (previously known as Thinstall) was originally developed by Jitit Inc. and was acquired by VMware on January 15, 2008.

[10] ThinApp is able to execute applications without them being installed in the traditional sense by virtualizing resources such as environment variables, files and Windows Registry keys.

ThinApp does not have any pre-installed components and does not require the installation of device drivers allowing applications to run from USB flash drives or network shares without ever requiring Administrator rights.

Unlike self-extracting ZIP files, ThinApp does not extract files to disk or require system registry changes in order to run applications.