Native macOS Updates in Tauri Shouldn't Be This Hard

Four Tauri projects. Four times I wrote the same update dialog.

Download progress bar. Markdown release notes. “Remind Me Later” button. Same code, copied across repos, maintained separately. By the fourth project, I was done.

The Problem

Tauri’s built-in updater downloads binaries and verifies signatures. It has a basic dialog: release notes, two buttons, that’s it.

No download progress. No “Remind Me Later.” No background checking.

You want any of that, you build it yourself.

Meanwhile, every native macOS app uses Sparkle. Raycast. CleanShot. Countless others. Same dialog. Same flow. Users recognize it immediately.

Sparkle handles everything I kept rebuilding: background checks, phased rollouts, localization. All the edge cases I’d never think to handle.

So why was I still writing custom update UI?

The Answer

Sparkle is Objective-C. Tauri is Rust. Bridging them isn’t trivial.

But “not trivial” isn’t “impossible.”

The Plugin

So I built one. tauri-plugin-sparkle-updater wraps Sparkle’s SPUStandardUpdaterController and exposes it to Tauri.

Rust:

tauri::Builder::default()
    .plugin(tauri_plugin_sparkle_updater::init())
    .run(tauri::generate_context!())

TypeScript:

import { checkForUpdates } from 'tauri-plugin-sparkle-updater-api';

await checkForUpdates();

Call checkForUpdates(). Sparkle takes over. Native dialog. Progress bar. Release notes. Done.

For programmatic control, the plugin exposes 41 commands and 18 events. Build a custom flow if you want. But you don’t have to.

Cross-Platform

This only works on macOS. That’s the point.

Cross-platform doesn’t mean identical UI everywhere. It means doing each platform well.

#[cfg(target_os = "macos")]
builder = builder.plugin(tauri_plugin_sparkle_updater::init());

#[cfg(not(target_os = "macos"))]
builder = builder.plugin(tauri_plugin_updater::Builder::new().build());

Your Windows users get updates. Your macOS users get native updates.

The best update experience is invisible. Users click a button, see a familiar dialog, move on. No one should have to build that from scratch.