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kotlinlang

Hello everyone, is there a way to implement auto-update functionality for desktop application? Like in Jetbrains toolbox we can see that the new update is available and we can install it

Currently only a 3rd-party tool, Conveyor, does it. 

<https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/14.2/|https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/14.2/>

Conveyor is free if your project is open source

Thats the problem, are there another alternatives for non open source projects?

<@U06SJGA8AUF> My company develops Conveyor, I'd be interested to know what price point you need? Is the issue the specific price, or just the process of purchasing something in your company makes it hard to use anything that's not free?

Im gonna be honest, im building an app (not a small one:sweat_smile: and im planning on monetizing it) and its just me. I'm a student and so the pricing is really a problem. I totally get that tools have a price so thats why i was asking for free alternatives. Ive done  autoupdaters on the past in windows but this time im trying to target Mac too and i dont know where to even start. Thanks btw!

You have a few options

<https://github.com/update4j/update4j|https://github.com/update4j/update4j> (recently, seems to be no longer maintained)
<https://www.jdeploy.com/|https://www.jdeploy.com/>
<https://github.com/threerings/getdown|https://github.com/threerings/getdown>
<https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle|https://github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle> (macOS only)
<https://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle|https://github.com/vslavik/winsparkle> (Windows only)
<https://github.com/bitgamma/updatefx|https://github.com/bitgamma/updatefx> (no longer maintained)
<https://github.com/libgdx/packr|https://github.com/libgdx/packr> (haven't heard of it before and I'm not sure if it have auto update built-in)

Or you could publish to Flatpak, Snap, Apple store or Microsoft store which already has this functionality built-in, it doesn't provide a way to enforce updates before launching the app which is a good thing for the user experience. 

You could write your own solution, if the application JAR/binary is not small, then the solution will become more complex as you need to use delta update to download only the changes.

<@U06SJGA8AUF> Thanks. This is a super common bit of feedback we get actually.

I really want to help people in your position, but have never been able to figure out a way to do it that doesn't also give it for free to plenty of companies that can easily pay.

You could add a limit in case if a company makes a certain amount of money, then the tool will require payment.

It usually can be bypassed regarding of the implementation.

The other issue is that desktop app distribution does expect you to have signing keys. Distributing through the MS Store reduces the cost significantly assuming you can deal with the hassle of their review process and requirements, but for Mac you still need a developer subscription (~$100/yr).  If you don't want to be in the MS Store then you need Windows certs (~a few hundred $ a year). So people who don't want to buy a tool often don't want to buy signing certificates either. In most cases what such people want is something entirely free end-to-end. The only such platform that exists is the web, because it's funded by advertising.