Currently the only way to update a natively-installed app is to uninstall/reinstall. Reasons to provide an update mechanism: Bug fixes in the native-app implementation New Firefox version is available on user's machine (at a minimum this requires modifying the application.ini file in the natively-installed app) Extending the feature set of natively-installed apps

We do need native app updating for handling the case that the snippet of code in the native launch binary needs updating. A new Firefox version will get used automatically after installation (at least on Mac, what about Windows?), no .ini file changes. Extending the feature set might require a native-app update, but I think could instead be put into the addon. Apps are going to have to query for what extended apis are available anyway, so they can look in the addon, in some standard place, and the code could be injected from there. I think. :)

(In reply to Dan Walkowski from comment #1) > We do need native app updating for handling the case that the snippet of > code in the native launch binary needs updating. Yup! > A new Firefox version will get used automatically after installation (at > least on Mac, what about Windows?), no .ini file changes. I was thinking about the case where the new version of Firefox exceeds the maxVersion in the XUL app's application.ini. It would be a bummer to update Firefox and suddenly find that launching apps just throws an error dialog > Extending the feature set might require a native-app update, but I think > could instead be put into the addon. Apps are going to have to query for > what extended apis are available anyway, so they can look in the addon, in > some standard place, and the code could be injected from there. I think. :) That sounds pretty awesome, but what about menus and such that are specified in XUL?

A Pivotal Tracker story has been created for this Bug: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/24808703

Jen - This is not needed to be built around the same time marketplace beta is released, right? Can you confirm?

Updating of the native app runtime is automatic, and already implemented for both Mac and Windows.

Dan - Could you clarify what I need to do to verify this bug? Trying to figure out what I need to test here.

Well, the easiest way would be to fake a newer version of the webapprt in Firefox, then launch an app, and the new version will get copied in. You could make the one in the app 'older', but that requires more work, as the version # is compiled in.

(In reply to Dan Walkowski from comment #7) > Well, the easiest way would be to fake a newer version of the webapprt in > Firefox, then launch an app, and the new version will get copied in. You > could make the one in the app 'older', but that requires more work, as the > version # is compiled in. Hmm okay. Since the web apps implementation has nightly build support with some FF 14 builds and FF 15 builds, could it be possible to verify the bug this way: 1. Install a Firefox 14 Nightly build on 4/23/2012 2. Install some web applications 3. Launch those web applications 4. Update the nightly build to the latest Firefox 15 Nightly build 5. Re-launch those applications

Verified on OS X 10.7 and Windows 7 64-bit.