Our automatic update process is pretty bad. We release once a week, and every week over a half million people need to go through this process.

There are errors, bugs, folks want better feedback, and the squirrel icon + release notes are really really confusing:

• Status bar icon persists after installing updates settings-view#511
• Post upgrade, makes the squirrel icon gray atom-archive/release-notes#38
• Restart and Update Doesn't from Release Notes Page #5692
• The update squirrel should not be colored for release notes #6922
• Release notes don't seem to update properly #3757
• "Check for update" says no update is available although a new one is available. #8265

What happens now

• Download an old version
• Start it
• Notice there is a blue squirrel in the status bar, and it says 'view release notes'
• Click the squirrel
• See the release notes, note that they are showing notes for an old release
• Click the restart and update button
• Atom quits, notice that there is no feedback as to what is happening.
• It's still not back. What's up?
• Atom restarts again after 5 - 15 seconds
• Notice that the release notes are up in the reloaded window. They are still out of date, and still have the 'Restart and Update' button showing and enabled
• Notice that the squirrel icon is still showing, and still blue, with the same tooltip text
• I click the squirrel because it's still there, and not going away. It focuses the release notes. Ok.
• I'm thinking: is there another update??!? What is happening?
• I check the atom menu
  • Click the 'About' item, theres no information saying it's the latest version
  • I notice there is a version number, and a 'Check for update'
  • Nothing indicates I'm at the latest version
• On reload, squirrel goes away; still nothing tells me I'm at the latest version. But no squirrel, so I guess so?

A 70% fix

tl;dr: fix the squirrel icon, remove the release notes package, use the about package for update status (similar to chrome).

• An update becomes available
• The blue squirrel shows, its tooltip says "Downloading update for version 1.0.20..."
• Clicking the squirrel shows the about page which shows
  • the current version
  • new version detected
  • some text indicating that the update is being downloaded
• When it's finished downloading:
  • the blue squirrel turns green, with a tooltip of "Version 1.0.20 is available"
  • the about page now shows that an update is available, and has a button to restart the editor
  • The menu item now takes you to the about page
• Clicking the green squirrel still shows / focuses the about page
• Clicking reload reloads the editor like today
• On reload the about page is shown.
• The about page indicates that you are up to date, and has a link to the release notes
• The squirrel is gone after reload as the about page has the relevant information

Additionally, take a stab at the bugs:

• Error checking for updates immediately after updating Atom #7854
• Manually updating Atom vs updates #6482

Bonus:

• In the about page, indicate which release rail you are on. beta? stable? development?

An extra 10%

Add some kind of feedback when atom is reloading. A small window with an infinite spinner would be sufficient. The goal is to indicate that it is working.

That last 20%

• Add progress to the download in squirrel (cc @joshaber, is this possible today?)
  • Add progress to the menu item in %
  • Add progress to the squirrel icon
    • Could add a progress bar to the tooltip
    • Could make the blue squirrel "fill up" with green as it progresses
• Add an option to turn off automatic downloads in the about page to fix Downloading an update without asking causes problem for users on mobile data plans #1882