Mac App Store updater crashing my apps

FWIW - I'm already using RSAppMovementMonitor (https://github.com/redsweater/RSAppMovementMonitor) but it won't detect the updater process swapping the binaries while the app is running..

My user-level experience with the App Store app on the Mac is that it requires the user to quit the app it’s planning to update. Indeed, I just tried it here (on my main work machine, running macOS 13.0.1) and got this alert:

Close This App to Update

Click Continue to quit “Tap Forms 5” and complete the update.

[Cancel] [[Continue]]

Is that not happening for your app?

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Hi Quinn,

That would seem sensible.

However, since a couple of macOS releases I'm getting crash reports whenever I'm updating a view: Usually it happens after e.g. adding a binding or custom transformer in version B.

The crash reports then come in for version A shortly after version B has been released and refer e.g. to the binding not present in the view controller or the value transformer (introduced only in newer version B) not known in older version A.

I should mention that the UI of my apps is modular consisting of 100+ .xibs (.nibs), so lazy loading appears to be in effect.

And this happens reliably every time I'm updating/extending the UI. (probably affecting less than 1% of the user base but still annoying as I cannot do anything about the App Store's update mechanism)

Thanks, Jay

So, to be clear, you’re not able to reproduce this yourself, but rather are inferring the problem based on these crash reports?

[Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.]

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Hi Quinn,

Exactly. Only crash reports with the very specific circumstances described above.

I also haven't bothered open a support request with DTS for this reason -
from experience this kind of incident usually goes nowhere w/o providing exact steps on how to replicate an issue..

Cheers,
Jay

—

    JayMcBee
  

less than a minute ago

Can you reproduce this with TestFlight? That is:

1. Create a dummy update that changes something that you think should trigger this issue.

2. Push that to TestFlight.

3. On a victim Mac, run your old app.

4. And then install the TestFlight version on top of that.

I believe that TestFlight uses the same install path as App Store, so this is your best shot at being able to reproduce the issue.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Interesting idea - I'll give it a try and report back.

Cheers,
Jay