Sparkle (software)

Software framework for macOS

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services . Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "Sparkle" software – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Sparkle

Sparkle's Test App showing a software update window
Original author	Andy Matuschak
Developer	Sparkle Project (2014–present)
Initial release	January 9, 2006 (2006年01月09日)

Stable release	2.6.0 / March 15, 2024; 20 months ago (2024年03月15日)
Repository	github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle Edit this at Wikidata
Written in	Objective-C, Swift
Operating system	macOS
Type	Software update
License	MIT License
Website	sparkle-project.org

Sparkle is an open-source software framework for macOS designed to simplify updating software for the end user of a program. Sparkle's primary means of distributing updates is through "appcasting," a term coined for the practice of using an RSS enclosure to distribute updates and release notes.

History

[edit ]

Sparkle 0.1 (beta) was released in January 2006 by Andy Matuschak to provide apps "instant self-update" functionality, which very few applications had at the time.^[1]

In August 2009, Sparkle added support for delta updates for installing smaller and faster incremental updates. This was first used to update WebKit's nightly builds.^[2]

In 2016, Radek discovered a man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in applications that use Sparkle to receive updates through an unencrypted channel.^[3]