Our most recent version of Shu allows a standard Adobe AIR application to have the same AIR install experience but with the benefits of extra commands missing from the AIR runtime.

With this new version, one thing we are often asked is:

“Can I update my Shu application like a normal AIR app?”

While the simple answer is “yes”, a little more explanation is needed to implement.

The first thing to note is that any new version of the application needs shipping as a new Shu Packaged application, not just an updated AIR file.

The application output via the Shu Packager is a installer which installs AIR (if not already present) followed by installing the AIR file. It then performs a little magic to enable the extra commands.
If you just delivered the new AIR file, the last bit of magic would not be performed and you would lose all the Shu commands.

The second thing to note is that in your update descriptor XML file, you need to point the <url> element to the Shu output installer, not to the AIR file.

Lastly its important that we prevent the air.update.ApplicationUpdater from actually attempting to install the downloaded update (after all, its expecting an AIR file not our native installer).
Instead, we want to do this bit ourselves, and luckily, because we are a running Shu based AIR application, we can execute the installer using shu.System.execAsync!

So, I have created a little class to deal with this last step.

It can be used as a direct replacement of ApplicationUpdater.
Whilst this class will be included in the next version of Shu, for now, download here.