Common Questions About Appflow Live Update

Overview

Appflow Live Update is a tool that enables you and your team to send live code changes directly to your users without waiting in line for App Store reviews and approvals.

What is the definition of a "live update"?

A live update is a single download of web resources from the Live Update service. These web resources are used to replace some or all of the contents of either a standalone web app or the contents of a web app hosted within a native app. An app can receive a live update based on:

• The CHANNEL_NAME variable configured in your app's installation of the Live Update plugin.
• The native versioning setup for the Web Deploy Build

How are live updates counted?

A live update is counted when a download attempt for an update has been triggered. 

If the “auto” or “background” live update method is used in an app, then a download attempt will occur when the app is opened and after the app confirms that a compatible live update is available for download. 

An app using the “background” live update method can also trigger a download attempt once the app has regained focus after being in the background for longer than the duration specified by the minBackgroundDuration configuration.

If the download of the live update is interrupted (e.g. due to unstable internet connectivity) then the live update will not be applied to the app but the download attempt will count towards the live update usage. 

What happens when live deploys are depleted for the month?

The limits associated with each plan are on a calendar month basis. Your quota will refresh at the beginning of each calendar month. If you exceed your quota for a given month, you will have to upgrade to a higher plan, or wait until the next calendar month to send more updates. If you need more than 25,000 updates (the highest self-service limit), contact our sales team for an Enterprise plan that will scale to meet your needs.

How do I update the live update plugin?

New releases of the live update plugin are created to accommodate changes introduced in updates to a mobile device’s operating system that can prevent an app from receiving a live update. Changes introduced in new releases of this plugin modify the native layer of the application. Therefore an app can only receive the latest version of the live update plugin through a binary release. 

To update the plugin in the app, modify the package.json file to target the latest version of the plugin. 

"cordova-plugin-ionic": "^X.X.X",

Then run npm i to update the package-lock.json accordingly. Commit and push changes to the remote repo. 

If Appflow is used to create the native build artifacts for the app, then create and deploy new native builds from the Appflow dashboard using the recently pushed commit. Otherwise, prepare the project locally by running the following commands:

npm run build

Ionic deploy manifest

npx cap sync

Then compile the project from Android Studio and XCode and deploy the resulting build artifacts to the corresponding app stores.