About Thortspace updates
We pretty much update the four “commercial” platform versions (Android, iOS, Windows and Mac) on every release cycle — typically about once every 1–2 months we do a release on all four of these platforms.
The windows build typically comes first because it is the easiest one to debug.
And then we do the Android because it is the easiest to publish to the App store (ie. the “Google Android Playstore”).
iOS and Mac releases have to be negotiated with and approved by Apple — which the longer we have gone on, the less hassle they have given us, but still can catch us out sometimes. (My point being that it is better if at all possible to spot bugs via the Windows and Android releases, so we don’t have to go round too many times with submitting releases to Apple, and then withdrawing them cos we found a bug.)
We publish the Android version to an “Alpha” channel first — there’s about 60 people who have signed up to get the Android alpha versions. Then if it is seeming like it’s at least as stable and has no bad bugs that are worse than the previous release this then goes out to the production channel which is the update that most people get.
The windows platform is the easiest to code on, but it is also the one which has least built-in installation / update infrastructure. Yes there is a Windows App store, but there are a whole bunch of caveats to using it — most significant of which is probably that it’s not available on Win7, Win8, Win8.1 — so unless we wanted to exclude ~25% of windows users who are still running Win7 (~20%) and Win8 versions (~5%) we would need to publish both to the Win App store and an independent installer. It might hopefully deal with the AV false positives, though — so maybe worth thinking about again — particularly if Win7 diehards start to fall away.
We do a Linux version update to include all the bug fixes from the last 4 or 5 releases about once every 4 or 5 releases. This is unfortunately just a consequence of having a relatively small number of Linux users — about 2% of our total installs have been on Linux O.S.es . If you really really want a Linux update then send us a message on one of the channels — eg. a comment below would be fine — and that will nudge us to do it sooner.
