Redirect Your DevMate Sparkle Update Feeds Now

Sep 13th, 2019

Fellow developer Daniel Kennett mentioned that he requested a HTTP redirect for the DevMate feed to his own server. I probably wouldn’t have thought of this, and think it’s a great idea. This way, you can reach DevMate customers long after their servers have stopped responding.

You should, of course, also send them an email with transition instructions. Please don’t just rely on the update server approach to work, because eventually devmate.com might be gone for good, and then the redirects won’t work anymore.

The update URLs for DevMate follow a very simple format:

http://updates.devmate.com/BUNDLE_ID

To look up the BUNDLE_ID, Head to your Settings > Basic App Details in the DevMate dashboard. There, you can set the App Icon and see the App Name and Bundle ID. Since the text fields are disabled, you may need to inspect the HTML source in your browser to conveniently copy the contents.

Download the feeds for reference and upload them to your servers. Then ask the DevMate support to redirect to your place.

Currently, it seems this process takes quite a while. A couple of weeks, in fact. I don’t know if that’s because of their high support ticket volume, or because they are still coding the infrastructure for update redirects.

Either way, I highly recommend you do this now so your redirect is functional rather sooner than later.

Update 2019-09-14: Oh, and also deploy an update with the new feed URL so you don’t rely on the redirect for longer than absolutely necessary!

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Please Also Change Your Feed URL's Inside Your Apps

In my post about redirecting the DevMate update feed, I missed the opportunity to mention that you should probably also update your app very soon to not rely on DevMate’s framework.

Mr Boy van Amstel at Danger Cove picked up the topic and explains how you can change your feed URL inside the app using the Sparkle SUUpdaterDelegate methods. DevMate’s closed-source framework wraps this in its DM_SUUpdaterDelegate_DevMateInteraction protocol.

Your battle plan thus should be:
1. Redirect the remote feed URL to deploy updates to existing customers working with old versions, and
2. Change the feed URL used inside the app as soon as possible and deploy an update to not rely on the redirect for too long.
I use the SUUpdaterDelegate to switch feed URL’s in The Archive and WordCounter, too, in case you wonder if this is a good idea in the first place.

See also:
- Store Sparkle settings in custom UserDefaults
With DevMate Closing Shop, Here's What You Can Do

DevMate are closing their doors. The announcement isn’t news anymore, but since I didn’t use their service, I didn’t think much of it. I did report back in 2016 when they changed their pricing model. Nowadays I discover more and more people struggling to migrate away, and my blog pops up in their searches – apparently because I wrote a book on selling apps on FastSpring.
With DevMate Closing Shop, Here's What You Can Do

DevMate are closing their doors. The announcement isn’t news anymore, but since I didn’t use their service, I didn’t think much of it. I did report back in 2016 when they changed their pricing model. Nowadays I discover more and more people struggling to migrate away, and my blog pops up in their searches – apparently because I wrote a book on selling apps on FastSpring.