User reports a Sparkle Updater.app is sticking around and restarting my app randomly

[kode54]

I use Sparkle in my sandboxed app, and a user is reporting that there is an updater.app here:

/Users/xxxx/Library/Caches/org.cogx.cog/org.sparkle-project.Sparkle/Launcher/2SP16lpdr/Updater.app

I am wondering if this is correct? It appears to still be on their system, and every time they quit the Cog app, it restarts itself automatically.

[zorgiepoo]

That kind of path is correct. Sparkle spawns Autoupdate (actual installer) and Updater.app (UI agent for relaunching app, which is also copied to such a temp directory). Under most usual circumstances Updater will remove itself after relaunching the app, or after Autoupdate failed, or after the job finished. In some less usual circumstances when Updater is forcefully terminated for example, the app may not have time to clean itself, and Sparkle should garbage collect it during some future update.

Autoupdate and Updater.app require coordination with each other, are designed to be one-shot and not repeating, relaunching requires user initiating the action from the app via the user driver (or possibly updater delegate), are not designed to have multiple instances of Autoupdate for the same updating bundle id, and Updater tries to clean itself up.

There is a weak connection here to Sparkle. Check if these two processes are running and ensure your app isn't always trying to install an update (seems improbable really) and your app isn't doing anything out of the ordinary to request it for being relaunched.

[kode54]

User claims the app is auto restarting itself when Force Quit, and attempting to install my non-Sparkle using App Store version fails due to a busy copy existing in the Applications folder. They managed to somehow trigger it after downgrading by several years worth of updates, too.

[zorgiepoo]

I would try to collect system logs (like via sudo log collect --last 5m) after the issue occurs. And I'd also wonder why they have to force quit -- is the app hanging? Maybe collect a sudo spindump Cog while the app is hanging (Sparkle 2 doesn't do anything inside the app specifically on quit/termination). Look to see if there are any relevant recent Crash Reports in Console application too.

So you need real live/runtime diagnostics. Just finding a stray Updater.app that Sparkle hasn't yet cleaned up lying around on disk is neither that abnormal nor indicative of much.

[kode54]

Looks like I had some crash issues that I needed to solve, and I hope manually updating to the latest version fixes it for these users. Basically, I was using deprecated insecure keyed unarchive of an NSData, and if that failed, ended up treating the NSData like an NSDictionary. Oops.