33
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
33 points (97.1% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
25 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because you're literally re-downloading the entire app, tossing the old version, and installing the new.
It's not modifying existing files with the changes, it's just replacing the package completely (while keeping config/user files).
Those user files/configs make up the missing data between new+old.
Lol I thought at first devs calculated exactly what portions of the apps need updating and uploaded only that much portion in the app stores. I dunno what to make of this discovery now.
That can get really convoluted, especially when users update at different times from different past versions.
One user may be able to make the most recent changes as they have the most recent version not including the update thats being pushed right now; another user however may be 15 revisions behind and have to find and apply each of those 15 updates in the correct order to arrive at the same set of files.
It's much easier to just push the most recent set of files in their entirety to users and have them replace whatever they've got. Then you know they didn't make any mistakes applying several subsequent changes in a row.
That's fairly easy to do for interpreted languages, but it's a lot more problematic for compiled apps that are distributed as a machine code binary.
I think windows update does that, or at least used to do. That's why it is so slow to update, because you need every update in succession, you can't just grab the latest one.