Yes it's a pain. I wrote Conveyor to automate it all - makes appcasts, signs, notarizes, uploads to the download site and all that for you (see my other comment

Yes it's a pain. I wrote Conveyor to automate it all - makes appcasts, signs, notarizes, uploads to the download site and all that for you (see my other comment for more info). "to my knowledge none of these updaters are open source." It's a bit better on other platforms. Omaha does this on Windows and is open source, but it's also abandoned. Google are rewriting it as Chromium Updater. Also Omaha's complexity makes Sparkle look like hello world. Conveyor makes MSIX packages for Windows and DEBs for Linux. MSIX is a bit like Omaha, there's a local agent that wakes up from time to time and updates apps on their behalf. There are bugs in it for older versions of Windows but Conveyor works around them. I wouldn't recommend trying to use it directly because it'll seem to work on your nice and up to date Windows but fail for people who aren't accepting online updates. However, when you get it stable, it's actually a really nice feature set. Sparkle has the ability to update apps independently, without being invoked by the app itself, via a command line tool. Currently Conveyor does invoke Sparkle from within the packaged app at startup as per usual, but moving to a dedicated background service would be a good improvement.