AppWrapper installer package error

I used AppWrapper 3.5.2 (171) to wrap an app on El Capitan today. It’s not destined for the App Store, so no fancy stuff like entitlements or deli mustard.

As usual, AppWrapper created the wrapped app and an Installer package.

I ran the Installer, it ran as usual. But the app wasn’t in the /Applications folder!

Looking at /var/log/install.log, I saw this message:

PackageKit: Applications/foobar.app relocated to Users/cweger/Documents/Backups/foobar/Builds - foobar.project/Mac OS X (Cocoa Intel)/foobar.app
In other words, the installer found an older copy of my app, and helpfully decided to replace it.

Maybe this is expected behavior, but I hate it. I’d rather keep older copies of my apps around for safekeeping. And especially since it’s not in the /Applications folder – I don’t want the Installer rooting around and touching other files.

Is there any way to tell AppWrapper to generate an installer script that doesn’t do this?

I’m a big fan of AppWrapper, it works great 99.9% of the time for my needs. Thanks Sam!

[quote=258434:@Charles Weger]In other words, the installer found an older copy of my app, and helpfully decided to replace it.

Maybe this is expected behavior, but I hate it. I’d rather keep older copies of my apps around for safekeeping. And especially since it’s not in the /Applications folder – I don’t want the Installer rooting around and touching other files.[/quote]
This has been my experience as well…

This is an intended behaviour of the installer

Yup.
It will even find an app that has been deleted, and replace the copy IN THE TRASH!
Its the most hare-brained idea Ive seen for a long while, and I ended up investing in DropDmg instead.
Everyone seems to be able to handle ‘drag this to the applications shortcut’

Hah, that I did not know.

It is how Apple Installers work. If you want to get fancy shmancy you’ll have to dig around with Package Maker and script your own stuff.

As a user this is preferred to installers anyway, because Installers could put things where ever they like and are sometimes just done wrong. The other day the an installer did everything in the pre-flight script without authorization and I was incredibly pissed off.

tl;dr Users prefer disk images over installers.

(I like DMG Canvas for pretty disk images, and scripting their creation with Xojo Build Scripts.)

Sometimes an installer IS required
But that is really pretty rare unless you install kexts, launchdaemons, etc

If you drag the installer package on to the App Wrapper icon, it will open the “Install Tester”; this will not only allow you to remove copies from your machine before running the installer, but it will also highlight where the application was installed.

Thats a handy tool Sam, (and while Im here let me big up App Wrapper again… its great!) but my experience is that it is the end-user that needed this functionality.

-" i installed your app but I cant find it."
…errrr

[quote=258522:@Jeff Tullin]its great!) but my experience is that it is the end-user that needed this functionality.

-" i installed your app but I cant find it."
…errrr[/quote]
Whatever the delivery method we’ve used in the past, there’s always been a customer who doesn’t quite understand it.

  • Zip file; Customers don’t understand that they need to move it the applications folder (we used to have code to do this, but it got broken with various OS updates and Sandboxing).
  • DMG file; Customers don’t understand that they need to move the application to the applications folder, no matter if you include an alias or not. When we used DMG, I’d get support e-mails at least once a week, normally starting with why I do I have to download your application everytime I restart the machine.
  • Installers; Arouses suspicion as it’s not the normal method for application distribution.

Now that we have the App Store, I get e-mails asking me why a customer needs to re-purchase the application to get an update. They think that the App Store will auto update apps downloaded from your site.

@Sam: so funny. My customers are mostly older and 95% are men. But I don’t remember any support email about installing. I’ve got a dmg with a custom installer, though.

I’m having the same trouble. I created an installer and it didn’t put it in the Applications folder like i expected it to do. I actually installed it and couldn’t find where it was placed. I even did a search for my app’s name and found the old versions, but not the new one even though it said it installed successfully. I guess I’ll have to find another computer to test it on. I don’t really want to delete old versions. When testing the installer, it would be more helpful if you could choose which one to replace, ie, the one in the Applications folder.

I agree it would be nice, but App Store compatible installers do not have this option.

If you use the “Installer Tester” function on the “Tools” menu of App Wrapper, it will show you where all existing copies are and will also show you where the Apple Installer, installed the application to.