“Application approval in the latest version of Configuration Manager 1806/1810 has gotten a lot of love! It’s one of the biggest changes to application deployment in many years. It still needs some finishing touches, but it’s well worth it to try it out and perhaps start using it.”
I wrote a blog post over at 4Sysops.com with some PowerShell examples to get you started with testing application approval to deploy applications without Collectons/Groups be sure to check them out it is really cool. As always provide feedback to the Configuration Manager team about what is good and what more features you want!