Sparkle Dot App: make a separate "app store"-style application that allows central management of updates with Sparkle

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Summary

Lots of Sparkle-using applications on my Mac are always chugging away in the background, checking for updates on their own schedules, each with their own "check for updates" checkbox, sometimes popping up auto-update windows at embarrassing or inopportune moments like during video games or presentations.

But I have times during the week when I know I'm going to have some downtime, and I hit the app store and brew update and go grab a coffee, letting all my auto-updates for those systems happen offline.

I'd love to be able to (A) defer updates for everything until I can afford to stare at some progress bars, and (B) know that all sparkle-using applications are definitively up to date (i.e. click "check for updates" all at once) before, e.g. getting on a plane or something.

Possible Fix

I'm not sure what IPC mechanism would make the most sense (maybe AppleScript, so that the "X wants to automate Y" permission manages this?) but it would be nice to have a separate Sparkle application that could, for users that wanted it, tell all the applications what to do.

Version

All.

[zorgiepoo]

There are multiple products that supposedly do this from Latest, MacUpdater, MacUpdate Desktop, CleanMyMac (which was actually causing problems ( #2071) recently). sparkle-cli included in a Sparkle 2 distribution could do something similar with a little scripting; Latest uses Sparkle 2's API to update other apps similarly.

A good product will probably handle updating apps delivered by other software update frameworks besides Sparkle. An even better one probably handles edge cases from app-to-app basis as Sparkle cannot always guess app-specific behaviors that are not extractable externally.

We don't officially endorse any of these, and creating such an updater app is likely out of scope for this project.

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I realize I had this idea several years ago in #1011 and just couldn't find it when I initially filed this. I'll close this since I'm sure the project doesn't need more duplicate issues lying around :).