Installer or no installer?

Question

There's lots of questions about installers but I haven't seen one about whether or not to actually use one in the first place.

What is the logic behind using them in the first place? Can't the user just extract it somewhere? But I guess it depends on the target user.

And on the subject of the actual setup: Can't that be done on the first startup?

Answer 1

It very much depends on your target audience, and what your installer needs to accomplish.

If your audience is technically savvy, and the installer just has to extract some files, and create shortcuts, I probably wouldn't bother.

If you need to modify system variables, register services, etc, definitely create an installer to make life easier for your users - regardless of how technically savvy they are.

You can always offer the option of installer / no installer, and let your users decide what they want. The number of downloads and resulting support requests will tell you whether you should utilize one or not.

Answer 2

And on the subject of the actual setup: Can't that be done on the first startup?

uTorrent used to do this (I'm not sure if it still does... I update automatically) and I found it a little confusing at first, since I'm used to installers. For users that are possibly clueless though, it's perfect.

For more complicated applications that have multiple files installed to several locations, I think it's better to have an installer. For a series of products we produce where I work, we have several 'flavours' of installer for each product: auto-update installers can be smaller as we know the user already has prerequisites. New users, though, get a larger installer.