Use Sparkle for automatic updates

[viktorstrate]

The Sparkle project would allow us to show a "new update available" propt to users.

I suppose this means that we need to figure out how to handle releases. Currently we don't have a regious release scheme, just the latest commit on the main branch. Maybe this is fine for now, since the project is still evolving very quickly. However, there might also be benefits to a proper release cycle.

I'd like to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this as well.

[ehamberg]

Might be worth taking a look at Amore.

[deadbaed]

It would be nice to have auto-updates disabled by default, so that people who want to update their app externally (like homebrew or nix) will not be nagged by prompts or have dmg files download without user action.

Also from a privacy perspective some users would not like apps to make calls to external servers outside of their matrix homeserver.

[deadbaed]

For pre-release updates, I like the way Ghostty does updates. They have two release branches:

• Regular, stable releases
• A Pre-release named "tip", which is the latest commit from main

In the settings, users can choose to auto download updates, and which release branch to track, either stable or tip. I see Ghostty also uses Sparkle.

Source: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/pre#macos