Squirrel/Squirrel.Mac

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1684 stars · 139 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Squirrel.Mac is a Cocoa framework for macOS that handles automatic application updates, driven by server-controlled update feeds. It lets servers decide which version clients should receive, enabling behaviors like phased rollouts and rollbacks.

Use cases

• auto-update my mac app from my own server
• server-controlled phased rollout of desktop app updates
• roll back a bad mac app release remotely
• add authenticated update checks to a cocoa application
• ship delta updates to reduce download size on macos

When to choose

• you ship a native macOS app and want server-driven automatic updates
• you need phased rollouts, rollbacks, or per-request update decisions
• you want an update framework designed for embedding in Cocoa apps

When to avoid

• you need a cross-platform updater covering Windows or Linux
• you want a fully client-side update feed without server-side logic
• your project is Swift-only and you cannot manage Objective-C dependencies like ReactiveObjC and Mantle

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

deployment developer-tools operating-systems desktop-applications developer-tools auto-update cocoa-framework objective-c app-updates electron-updater macos

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="Squirrel/Squirrel.Mac")