Versioning and checking for updates

• Add a way to view the ActivityWatch bundle version from the web UI and aw-qt (probably through the /api/0/info endpoint), the version could be stored in a VERSION.txt file or something upon build.
  • Done in https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-server/pull/45
  • Displayed in web UI in: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-webui/commit/59dfb6e30799087c2c7721814ca52d607bd840c9
  • Wasn’t entirely done, see https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/198
• Add a “Check for updates” link/button. In the future, this should check if there is a newer version available for you. But for now, it should just send you to the releases page on GitHub.
  • A naive version would be to detect if version is older than X months and then ask to update.

Option 1: Notification from aw-qt

Pros/cons:

• + Hard to ignore/miss
• - Might be considered spammy/annoying

To make sure notifications aren’t spammy, we could:

• Only notify once the installed version is >x months old and a newer release has been out for more than 1 week (to ensure the new release has been thoroughly battle tested).
• Use something like exponential backoff for the notifications? i.e. first one, then 5 days later, then 25 days later, then 125 days later (at which point it no longer makes sense to back off).

Option 2: Banner in the webui

Pros/cons:

• + Not intrusive
• - If you’re a passive user you might not see it

[billangli]

Hey @ErikBjare and @johan-bjareholt, I can start working on this issue if you guys need help with it. It seems like the other issues in the Road to 1.0 to-do list already has people working on them.

I think that these are all really good ideas. So to summarize the discussion, we need a feature that:

• Checks if there is a newer version that is not a prerelease version
• Reminds the user in the web UI
  • Only remind the user if the installed version is > x months old (I think since the user can disable the reminder, we don’t need to check this, we can explicitly tell the user how to disable this in the reminder itself)
  • Make sure the new release is at least a week old
  • Don’t remind the user constantly, take some time between notifications and save the status of the last check
• Allow users to stop notifications in the web UI
• Use an endpoint that is different from /info
• Modify content security policy
• Disable building this feature in aw-android

I also thought that maybe in the future the user’s end can can check with a centralized server for updates, new greeting messages, upcoming release info, etc. on startup. Is this what is meant by “phoning home”? Would this be stepping away from privacy-first?

[billangli]

@ErikBjare thanks for the explanation that makes sense 👍 I can get started on making this in the web UI.

You mentoned that we should do it in the web UI instead of aw-server-rust, it is to avoid potential merge conflicts with the migration to aw-server-rust right?