It's more insidious than disregard, I expect. I assume it's a beacon masquerading as an update check - monitoring app usage, user locations, and such.

Aside: If your users are in the same time zone you may not want to do checks/updates on startup per se in order to avoid putting all your update load into the same time slice.

> Aside: If your users are in the same time zone you may not want to do checks/updates on startup per se in order to avoid putting all your update load into the same time slice.

This one bite my in the ass with a login used by IRL offices which all wanted to log in at 9:00 at the same time lol

I’m not tracking. You can perform all that monitoring and more without pretending to be a software update.

> The problem with the auto-updater we had was that it would prompt the user to update the app as soon as it became available. This resulted in a popup appearing while users were recording the screen, which obviously provided a bad experience as it interrupted the recording the user was making.

The 5 minute bug was introduced while fixing this issue. But it was a bad one: I have so many apps "randomly" popping update notifications up all the time: Skype and Fantastical are the two worst, seemingly every day. The popups interrupt me when working, and _take keyboard focus_ meaning I lose the last half of a sentence, or sometimes even dismiss the dialog before I realise it's appeared.

> the product is not the main task running on a computer and it's not acceptable to make decisions about other peoples priorities

Yes! One thing I loved about early macOS (about OS X Tiger - Snow Leopard days) was that I never saw apps steal focus. On Windows at the time it happened all the time in various ways, but never on Mac. That included when apps started: if you were working in an app and started another but kept working in the first, the second started with the window in the background. It was lovely.

macOS has been letting apps steal focus for at least nine years now. [1,2]

The absolute worst are the ones that steal it while running in the background, unpredictably and with no visible UI.

[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/734007/how-do-i-tell-which-a... [2]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/123730/is-there-a-...

The fact that macOS allows apps to steal focus, with no obvious way to stop it, annoys the hell out of me. That it is apparently new-ish behavior is baffling.

Further: the two biggest productivity boosters macOS could add for me are:

1. Prevent focus stealing (again)

2. Probably more in Sparkle than macOS itself: apps today update constantly. I think it comes from web apps where you can deploy an update and people get it without realising, but updating a desktop app causes an interruption, so it shouldn't happen nearly as often. You end up with multiple apps during the day asking for updates. Apple tried to solve this through the App Store but many apps don't use it and use their own update mechanism, usually Sparkle.

So the Sparkle framework should collect all apps wanting to update and show a single notification (not a popup, a notification) once a day. Clicking it would show all apps that want to update. If you want to read release notes etc, you can there. But a single, centralised, shown via notifications not popups update mechanism for all Sparkle-enabled apps would be a _huge_ boost.

> Yes! One thing I loved about early macOS (about OS X Tiger - Snow Leopard days) was that I never saw apps steal focus. On Windows at the time it happened all the time in various ways, but never on Mac. That included when apps started: if you were working in an app and started another but kept working in the first, the second started with the window in the background. It was lovely.

Good point, when did Mac OS lose that? It's insulting if you know how it used to be.

Another concern, and this could be an Electron issue, why doesn't it download the file to a cache and then skip the download on subsequent checks? I wonder how this behaves on flaky internet access; does it restart the download instead of resuming?

> Why the hell does the app check every 5min for updates?

Part of it is just incompetence. Bootcamp dev is used to coding web apps where the code just gets to the client's machine every time (10 mb single page apps). When they transition to Electron, because it works with the same web tech they memorized, they see nothing wrong with doing these frequent updates.

Part of that is why I don't hate the idea of App Stores on desktop to distribute programs; The store can handle checking for update once per day instead of every app implementing it's own logic.