When you share an app, you enable your users to launch your app directly from their home screens or simply by navigating to the address you supply them with. Some app creators have noted that their users never get any of the updates they make to their apps. Effectively, shared apps seem to be frozen in time.
There’s actually been an easy way to update shared apps, so that they once again reflect the latest changes you’ve made: simply press the Share app button in the upper-right corner of Calcapp Creator. Doing so will not assign a new address to your app, it will simply update the app at the old address, meaning that apps installed to home screens or launched through bookmarks will be updated the next time your users launch them.
The way this works is very much by design, as you wouldn’t want your changes to go live straight away. If that were to happen, your users would interact with a half-updated app. If you inadvertently introduced errors in your formulas during the development phase, users unlucky enough to start your app when it had errors wouldn’t even be able to launch it. For that reason, we ask that you explicitly press the Share app button to let us know when you’re ready to make your changes live.
This behavior has been in place since we enabled apps to be shared back in 2016. To reduce confusion, though, we’re making one subtle change: the Share app button will read Update app if you have shared your app:
(If you stop sharing your app, by pressing the Stop sharing button in the window that appears when you press Share upp or Update app, the Update app button will once again read Share app. The next time you share the app, it will be given a new address which you’ll need to send your users.)
We hope that this change will more effectively convey how Calcapp handles app updates.