Snap Apps Update Behavior

snapd
1

Hello,
First time Snap user here.

I installed snap versions of Chromium (v77) & Opera browsers on Kubuntu 19.10. The Kubuntu installation copy itself is a clean one. Don’t have experience with snap applications before.

When Chromium v78 was released, first I noticed that Discover Software manager did not provide me any indications of an upgrade available. I read on this site that snap packages update automatically. Anyways, I refreshed Discover several times, cleared Chromium cache and restarted the browser several times but it was not updating to v78.

In Discover, I checked the latest version number and it showed v78 but my copy was still running v77. Then accidentally, I restarted the system and up on firing up Chromium, it had updated to v78.

Yesterday, Opera published an update to their browser. Just like the experience with Chromium, Opera did not update until I restarted the system.

Is this usual behavior with snap apps? Do they auto-update up on a system restart only? If yes, anyway to change this behavior? I would like to restart my system probably once a week or preferably once in two weeks and I am kinda person who wants to be on the latest & greatest version of Software programs.

I checked and confirmed that I have installed plasma-discover-backend-snap 5.17.1.

Hoping to get some suggestions on the above and if an issue exists, perhaps resolution to the same as well.

Thanks & Regards…

2

The issue you had here was most likely from Chromium getting refreshed (i.e. updated) in the background, and the old version of Chromium was still running and so when you restarted your system and restarted Chromium it started executing in the new version. You should only have to close Chromium and reopen it to start in the new version. I’m not sure why this didn’t happen for you, but to answer your question, you don’t need to restart your system to get snap updates, they happen automatically in the background.

3

Thanks for the reply.

I actually did close and re-opened Chromium multiple times before restarting the system. Perhaps, I need to completely kill the process and restart it?

Anyways, let me see for the next set of updates if apps get updated without restarting the system.

4

Yes I think you need to kill all processes associated with the snap. I’m not sure if Chromium continues to run in the background after you close a window or not (I know Google Chrome does this)