MICROSOFT I GOTTA LEVEL WITH YOU FOR A SECOND WHAT IN GODS NAME NEEDS UPDATING ON A FUCKING CLOCK
having seen this happen Quite A Lot Of Times during a job as a hardware tester a couple years back: I have a theory. That theory is that the Clock app - and indeed, multiple apps "bundled" with a Windows 11 install - do not exist before being run.
Part of the testing procedure at $oldJob was, any time we needed to make sure we were testing from a known good configuration, we would power the machine off completely, wipe the SSD, and reflash it with this week's drive image. The drive image was usually prepared by another lab across the world from us, so of course, reflashing it meant that this was a fresh install of Windows 11 with the most important drivers and updates installed and nothing else. Most importantly, reflashing meant that the OS would have forgotten all settings, including how to connect to the internet. Which we were told in no uncertain terms not to do unless strictly necessary, and not without making sure we had firewall rules set up to block connections to, well, any server that would read or take note of what hardware is in the machine. (This made benchmarks rather interesting, to say the least.)
Our tests would be carried out for as long as we could possibly do them without a network connection. If we needed a test file, we used a thumb drive. Et cetera. One particular test thwarted this, though: the microphone. The only program bundled with Windows 11 that can be used to just record audio is Sound Recorder. Sound Recorder "needs to update" before it will run. It cannot possibly know that it needs to update if it cannot reach a Microsoft server to check this, unless it has been told it's out of date before being run... at the factory.
So, the Sound Recorder that we were running, by my theory, is not actually Sound Recorder at all, but a stub program whose entire purpose is to connect to Microsoft Store and download the real Sound Recorder. The same goes for the Clock and any other program where this happens.
As for why they do this? ...(non-committal shrug noise)