Updates are where a small app earns or loses your trust, so here is exactly how ours work.
Delivery is Sparkle. The app checks our signed appcast feed and offers new builds in-app. Each release in the feed carries a cryptographic signature that the updater verifies before installing, on top of the code signing and notarization every build already goes through.
Channels keep risk where it belongs. Alpha, beta, pre-release, and stable builds live on separate feeds. Running the beta means your updater follows the beta channel; it does not mean every experiment we try lands on your Mac. The public build ships on the beta channel.
The cadence is weekly. A new signed build lands every week. Six of us work on Codeworks full time, and the feedback board is what sets the order of the work, so what gets planned there is what goes into the next build rather than into a backlog you never hear about again.
And it is optional. Automatic checks can be disabled in Settings, and an update never installs without asking. The same check is also the only time the app contacts us at all, which the privacy post in this series covers in full.
Boring, predictable updates are a feature. We intend to keep them boring.