According to PortableApps.com Updater - Your Apps Are Up To Date:
"When a new security fix for your browser is released or a new feature in your favorite game is available, the PortableApps.com Updater will automatically let you know."
However, Options=>Updater only has Check for updates for On platform startup, which indicates there are hardly any updates since the platform is supposed to remain open all the time albeit the occasional restart.
Can you indicate which is it?
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Most users restart the platform at least once per day at which point the updater automatically checks for apps and lets you know (unless you've manually disabled that). There isn't an option to auto check every X amount of time, but hourly checks are planned for the future once resources permit.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I think the documentation should reflect the auto update depends on restarts.
Do you have data on how many users restart (I assume you meant the computer itself) once a day?
A lot of people I know just let the computer fall into sleep when not used, including during the night.
I see the platform has a file called PortableAppsUpdater.exe. I thought about scheduling Windows to run it automatically. But unfortunately it displays it "must be run from the PortableApps Platform. It will not function properly when run directly."
How about a command line parameter that can pop the updater (which I'll run via Windows Task Scheduler)?
Other alternatives:
I updated to say each time you start the platform. Additional options for both hourly and daily (one of which will be the default depending on how I implement it and server load) will be added in an upcoming release. I've been waiting on some server changes for this.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Command line should might be easier to implement and aren't dependent on servers.
Will you consider adding any of the aforementioned parameters before a more complex change of daily/hourly?
The current infrastructure can't handle it and would cost me money to open it to more frequent automatic updates. That's why it's not implemented in the platform.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I think a daily check to see if there are new applications to be updated is a good balance to systems that are put to sleep and are awake the next day following the sleep cycle of the user.
Also to consider, PortalableApps.com updates frequently are batched. Some times there are updates every day, other times, a few days apart. So having a user miss the update check for a day, it will still be caught the next day, with an daily check (in the scenario, the Platform is put into sleep mode and then awaken again, the next day).
An hourly check, in my opinion is too frequent on the PortableApps.com servers, when it is multipled by many users. A user who sets it to check hourly would be like having 18+ users loading the server AND bandwidth for 18+ users, when in actual fact it's only 1 actual user.
Even when there are bugs, my gut feeling, is that it will still take a least a day for finding and fixing bugs and then testing to be certain the fix is correct, before a new revision of the application is made public. Under such scenario, a daily check by the platform will still be caught, at most 2 days later, for users who put their system to sleep and wake up the next day.
I'm working on a caching solution so each check, if there are no changes, results in only a handful of bytes. And then I may work on DIFFs. I'm leaning towards daily being the default with hourly as an option.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!