How to cause a chrome app to update as soon as possible?

Question

Deploying a chrome packaged app and publishing updates on the chrome web store allows users to automatically receive application updates. There are situations where you want to know if the running application is the most current or not, and updating it. E.G.:

• Just keeping the user on the most recent version.
• Detecting a mismatch between the application and server side APIs, and requiring the client side application to update to use new server side APIs.

Documentation for chrome.runtime.requestUpdateCheck() offers a status of "throttled", "no_update", "update_available", but doesn't indicate what to do if a newer version is required.

Answer 1

Install a listener for chrome.runtime.onUpdateAvailable, which fires when the new .crx file has been downloaded and the new version is ready to be installed. Then, call chrome.runtime.requestUpdateCheck:

chrome.runtime.onUpdateAvailable.addListener(function(details) {
  console.log("updating to version " + details.version);
  chrome.runtime.reload();
});

chrome.runtime.requestUpdateCheck(function(status) {
  if (status == "update_available") {
    console.log("update pending...");
  } else if (status == "no_update") {
    console.log("no update found");
  } else if (status == "throttled") {
    console.log("Oops, I'm asking too frequently - I need to back off.");
  }
});