Sparkle (software)

Sparkle is an open-source software framework for macOS designed to simplify updating software for the end user of a program. Sparkle's primary means of distributing updates is through "appcasting," a term coined for the practice of using an RSS enclosure to distribute updates and release notes.

Sparkle

Sparkle's Test App showing a software update window
Original author(s)	Andy Matuschak
Developer(s)	Sparkle Project (2014–present)
Initial release	January 9, 2006 (2006-01-09)
Stable release	2.6.0 / March 15, 2024; 14 months ago (2024-03-15)
Repository	github.com/sparkle-project/Sparkle
Written in	Objective-C, Swift
Operating system	macOS
Type	Software update
License	MIT License
Website	sparkle-project.org

• Free and open-source software portal

History

Sparkle 0.1 (beta) was released in January 2006 by Andy Matuschak to provide apps "instant self-update" functionality, which very few applications had at the time.^[1]

In August 2009, Sparkle added support for delta updates for installing smaller and faster incremental updates. This was first used to update WebKit's nightly builds.^[2]

In 2016, Radek discovered a man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability in applications that use Sparkle to receive updates through an unencrypted channel.^[3]