I'm pretty conservative about adopting third-party libraries (due to the long-term issues each one has the potential to cause), but an app updater is probably worth it.
It's just tricky, basically one fat edge case, and a critical part of your recovery plan in case of serious bugs in your app.
(This bug isn't the only problem with their home-grown updater. Checking every 5 min is just insane. Kinda tells me they aren't thinking much about it.)
> I'm pretty conservative about adopting third-party libraries (due to the long-term issues each one has the potential to cause), but an app updater is probably worth it.
Especially for a Mac-only application where Sparkle (https://sparkle-project.org/) has been around for almost two decades now and has been widely used across all sorts of projects to the point that it's a de facto standard. I'd be willing to bet that almost every single Mac "power user" on the planet has at least one application using Sparkle installed and most have a few.
As far as system package managers go, yeah. That's part of the price you pay for choosing Apple (Knows Best) TM. There is brew, nix and the like for applications on MacOS too though.
Apple doesn't "know best" - it's just that that is what the system package manager is.
You can use whatever you want outside of the App Store - most will use Sparkle to handle updates https://sparkle-project.org/. I presume Windows is similar.
> Apple doesn't "know best" - it's just that that is what the system package manager is.
The fact that that is what the system package manager is is why I said Apple "knows best". You can pick from dozens of system packages managers hooked up to hundreds, if not thousands of different repos on Linux.
It's just tricky, basically one fat edge case, and a critical part of your recovery plan in case of serious bugs in your app.
(This bug isn't the only problem with their home-grown updater. Checking every 5 min is just insane. Kinda tells me they aren't thinking much about it.)