Delta Updates for Electron Apps

Hi all, I am Sandeep. I have been working with Electronjs and its related tool since 2017. I have even contributed to electron-builder.

There is one big issue in electron-updater's update mechanism which was not been solved to date. There is no support for delta updates. There is support for the differential update which is pretty poor. A simple change downloads around a couple of MBs. Sometimes even more than 40MBs.

I have been working on this problem for 2 years now. Finally able to create a solution that uses binary diffing and is able to update the app just by downloading a couple of KBs.

It took longer than expected to launch. It works as a plugin of electron-builder.

Sandeep Acharya

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on April 27, 2022

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Very cool! I’ve seen delta updates for react-native apps, so it’s fantastic to see it come to electron.

Could you document the sign function? I’m unsure about implementation on first glance:
```
sign: async (filePath) => {
    // sign each delta executable
  },
```
It’s important to note that your library is not open-source https://electrondelta.com/license/ However, I like your lifetime license model, so I will consider it in future.

Thanks for sharing!
fromtheexchange

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4 years ago
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1. 2
  Delta updates are a game-changer. You can now release more updates to your users without thinking about bandwidth usage. Win-win for both the publisher and user.
  
  Yes, I am in the process of writing the documentation.
  
  For signing, you need to use SignTool.exe
  
  execSync(`signtool sign /f MyCert.pfx /p MyPassword /fd SHA256 MyFile.exe`);
  sandeep1995
  
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  4 years ago
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