Application Background updates

[dazzfazz]

Hi,

I've developed a stand alone desktop app using the Adobe Air SDK but if there is an update available for my application, the user has to download and install the new application, over the top of the previous install.

The problem is that this is fine for major updates but for smaller bug fixes this is a very tedious way of updating the bug fix.

Is it possible to update my Adobe Air application, with a background update?

This would then allow for simple bug fix updates to be downloaded in the background, and then when then the user can be notified there is an update ready to be installed.

In Short

Is it possible to update the main contents of my application, which is loaded into the Adobe Air player when the app starts, without having to install the main application all over again?

And if so, how would I might go about doing this?

Thanks in advance

[rewb0rn]

Hi,

we are using foreground forced updates, so I am sharing how we do it and maybe it helps you. This depends on which platform you are running on, though. iOS does not at any point allow any updates of your app that don't go through the app store review. However you can do remote updates on Android and desktop builds.

Basically what we have is a small container swf that will check for the latest version on our server. If the container finds that a new version is available that has not yet been downloaded, we download the actual game.swf along with any assets to the applicationStorageDirectory. When the update is done, we then load the game.swf and the user will be on the latest version of our app.

Whenever we release a new version of our apk, we bundle the current version of our game.swf and assets along with the apk so that the user does not have to do a download when they start the app for the first time.

As I said we are doing this check and update in the foreground when the user launches the app, but maybe this flow helps you to build a background update.

Good luck!

[dazzfazz]

Hi rewb0rn,

Thanks for your reply but your approach will not help really as this is a signed installed application which has a number of dependencies.

The reason I know this is that (installed on windows using a Captive runtime and not the Shared runtime);

1. I installed the signed application on my machine.

2. I then replaced the newly installed application.exe and the dependant application.swf files with an updated version

3. Tried running the application and got an Adobe Air warning stating the it could not load the content.

So the approach I've now taken is to try and use the Native Application Update approach

Testing on my localhost

1. I've been able build and install the application example above (Although I did have to migrate it across  to FlashDevelop as this is where I work best)

2. The application runs and checks for the udpate.xml file.

3. It works out that an update is needed.

4. It downloads the application.exe updated install file

5. And this is where it falls over, it trys to install the application.exe but I get a warning stating that "another application with that name already exists", and then the install stops.

To create the remote "applicationUpdate.exe" update install file, which the application downloads and tries to install, I used this example, "The following example creates an EXE file (a native installer file for Windows):" which appears to be a much simpler exe installer. Maybe Ive done something wrong here as when I look inside the "application.exe" (right click view archive), there are a lot more files in there than I expected. I only expected to see the new application.exe and the dependant application.xml files.

But as Ive said in point 5 above, when this is downloaded, it tries to install the application rather than update the application its being called to update, from.

Any help with this problem would be much appreciated.

Thanks