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Application Update Overview

Mobile application have significant maintenance requirements. Operating systems are frequently updated, introducing new features, but also incompatibilities. Device diversity and even different firmware on the same device model leads to ongoing patch efforts by the developers. Also, business changes as well as requirements coming from users need to be addressed and implemented into mobile solutions. Changes on the binaries of the mobile app need to be distributed to users either via public app stores or, in most enterprise scenarios, via an enterprise store usually provided by an MDM (Mobile Device Management) product. These releases add additional overhead to app development. In order to reduce the frequency of binary updates, mobile services offers the App Update feature. App Update allows you to deliver updates to your application without the need to distribute a new binary version through the app store or MDM solution, reducing the time-to-user for those updates. App Updates supports Mobile Development Kit as well as Kapsel-based applications.

Procedure for Kapsel-Based Apps

  1. Add the App Update feature to your mobile app configuration in the SAP mobile service cockpit.
  2. Add the Kapsel AppUpdate plugin to your Hybrid mobile app.
  3. Implement App Update lifecycle events, as described in the dedicated documentation.

Procedure for Mobile Development Kit-Based Apps

  1. Add the App Update feature to your mobile app configuration in the SAP mobile service cockpit.
  2. From SAP Web IDE's Mobile Development Kit editor, click MDK Deploy and Activate to begin the rollout of a new version of your Mobile Development Kit mobile app.

Feature Scope

Feature Description
Kapsel-based apps support Manage and roll out updates for Kapsel-based applications.
Mobile Development Kit-based apps support Manage and roll out updates for apps built with Mobile Development Kit.
Staging support Developers can upload new versions but restrict distribution to a predefined list of test users, before publishing to production.
Lifecycle events Various events are exposed to the app developer to control the behavior of the app. This allows a developer to let the user delay an update or force an update of the app, for example.
Manual upload of app versions Developers can manually upload new versions of their app using the SAP mobile service cockpit and APIs.
Command-line support Various command-line tools help to automate app lifecycle management.
Exposed RESTful API RESTful API for custom automation of app lifecycle management.

Last update: April 14, 2021