MacOS: Signal keeps asking to restart for update

[lethargosapatheia]

Today signal has asked me 6-7 times to restart in order to apply an update. It seems that nothing is happening, actually. I'm using the independent signal program on mac os high sierra.

Any ideas what's going on?

[scottnonnenberg]

Thanks for reporting this. It looks like that restart button has stopped working in the v1.0.39 -> v1.0.40 and v1.1.0-beta.2 -> v1.1.0-beta.3 transitions. So far we've only seen it happen on MacOS.

Sadly, the right answer is to close the application manually and it should update properly.

[lethargosapatheia]

Actually throughout the day I shutdown and turned on my computer several times. And I'm quite sure that the window still popped up. Anyway, I'll return with a comment if it happens again - who knows, maybe I didn't pay attention to the sequence of events.

[JohnTheodore]

gosh, I had this too. like 10 restarts today, super annoying. I manually killed the application and started it. I'll report back if there are still issues.

[scottnonnenberg]

@JohnTheodore What operating system are you on? When you say that you restarted, how did you do it?

[scottnonnenberg]

I've submitted a pull request to fix this issue: #1866

I've also submitted an Electron bug for this behavior: electron/electron#11346

[JohnTheodore]

This was on macos, I went to file -> quit.

[eternaltyro]

I had this problem on MacOS 10.13.1. Asked for restarts around 7 times or so. Signal v1.1.0-beta.3. Can confirm that this doesn't happen after manual restart.

[Dyras]

I have the beta and I have:
Restarted by clicking the 3 dots and then clicking restart
Restarted by pressing cmd+q and then starting the program again manually
Restarted by face palming so hard the universe itself restarted

How the hell did you people update by manually restarting? 😢

Edit: Using MacOS High Sierra

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c0dff6e9568c1d1550f03f445f006f2a

[asciifaceman]

macOS Sierra
10.12.6

Got the nag all day. Restart button did not work, restarting through the dotburg menu did not work.

Signal -> Quit exited the app, and then it restarted itself and patched (where normally the expected behavior would be just quit.)

Looks like the quit behavior is working, restart is just not hooked up to it.

[Dyras]

I've quit the app 5 times and the gawd damn thing won't update. Any ideas @scottnonnenberg ?

[scottnonnenberg]

The process that's worked for me is:

1. Wait for the restart dialog to pop up
2. Hit 'restart'
3. Wait 20 seconds to a minute
4. Exit the application with CMD+Q or Alt-F4

It should restart with the new version. If not, worst case you can uninstall the app and re-download it. It's entirely non-destructive to your saved data. But we'd really like to figure out all the parameters of this behavior so we can give advice to people when they contact support.

[lethargosapatheia]

In my case the problem seems to have been solved.

[andihindle]

This appears to be a problem with 1.0.35 (I raised a support request via signal.org a while back but never heard anything). At this point I'm not even sure what the correct current version should be, but I'm still seeing this behaviour. macOS 10.13.2.

To add: just restarting (i.e. via Signal-Quit or equivalent) makes no difference. No update is applied, and the message altering to the update comes up again shortly after.

Mainly reporting it in case the earlier version helps track down the problem.

From this thread is sounds like deleting the app and then reinstalling from scratch is the best workaround... is that indeed the case?

[Dyras]

@andihindle Here's what worked for me:
Open the app
Wait 30 seconds before you do anything else
Click "restart"
Wait 5 minutes
Cmd+Q
Wait 5 minutes
Start the app

[scottnonnenberg]

@andihindle The latest version of 1.0.41. Is it possible that you're running Signal.app from your downloads directory? It can't update itself there on the latest versions of MacOS.

[DeathTickle]

I'm having the same issue since I updated to Signal v1.2.0 on MacOS 10.12.6.

Every restart of Signal leads to a new nag and clicking "Restart" stops the application but does not start it back again. It also does not change the signal version when I restart it manually.

[scottnonnenberg]

@DeathTickle Where is the Signal.app on disk? Is it in /Applications or a different location? If you're not an admin on your machine, you should move it into your user-specific applications directory: ~/Applications.

[DeathTickle]

I am an admin on my machine and my Signal.app is under /Applications. I will try with a copy of the Signall.app in ~/Applications.

Update: I have the same problem with the application under my user-specific directory.

[scottnonnenberg]

@DeathTickle Next time you start up the app, start it from Terminal. You can do that with a command like /Applications/Signal.app/Contents/MacOS/Signal. The log entries printed out there may include more information about attempts to update Signal.app with the new version - please add them here. Feel also free to reach out to me directly (see my profile) with that info.

[DeathTickle]

Well ... turns out when I started the application from the command line with /Applications/Signal.app/Contents/MacOS/Signal it started as the new version (1.3.0). The log entries don't show anything related to failed updates. I don't really understand how starting the app from the command line would have helped but I guess it is fixed. Thanks.

[scottnonnenberg]

I'm gonna close this, since the original issue is absolutely fixed.