But one nice thing about Sparkle is that there are documented preference keys which can be used to control its behaviour, and while this has to be done for each individual app, the behaviour and methodology of doing this is understood and predictable. Squirrel is a bit like the next generation of Sparkle, supports Windows, and works using more server-side logic than Sparkle, which uses a simple RSS feed (which can still be generated using any server-side logic one wishes). This stands to reason, as Squirrel is a companion project to the Atom editor, out of which the Electron project was born. Slack recently did a big rewrite using Electron, and it looks like they also adopted Squirrel for the auto-update component on both Mac and Windows. This “helper tool” dialog shown above happens when the auto-updater used by Slack knows that it’s not going to have the rights to modify the Slack app bundle (because it’s owned by root), and so it prompts for admin authorization to install a helper tool so that it can do its work with elevated privileges. This can be overridden to another user, but there’s an assumption that Munki is “managing” the installation of said application on the system. I use Munki to deploy all of our software, and typically one deploys apps to /Applications (when copied from disk images) using root:wheel ownership, because it’s considered a “system” install, not a user install. Nearly every one of the 100+ applications we install across my org needs some additional configuration to disable a built-in auto-updater. Dialogs like this are all too common for those who manage large numbers of computers, because of at least one of: 1) Users running the applications aren’t administrators and an application assumes they are, 2) An application assumes a user can modify files or the app bundle in /Applications, and that there may only be, in fact, one user using this application on the computer, or 3) An application has an auto-updater which is problematic to disable via a configuration profile or script.
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