UpdateStar - Simplify your software life

Update your software and prevent problems

No more missed important software updates! UpdateStar Premium lets you stay up to date and secure with the software on your computer.

Now supports more than 1,437,000 third-party software titles and delivers updates for your software including minor upgrades.

Comes with a $29 bonus product in your cart - in May only

Includes

Hourly database updates

All version upgrades

How software vendors create UpdateStar compliant products

This page provides software vendors with guidelines on how to create UpdateStar compliant products.

For software vendors it is crucial to serve customers with their products. UpdateStar provides software users with latest version information. As a software vendor you profit from raised interest in your products and activated sales and upgrade potential for your commercial products.

Guidelines

Use the following guidelines to make sure to provide millions of UpdateStar users with correct product and version information, which UpdateStar gathers from user PCs:

Make sure your installer adds a registry key to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall (or alternatively the corresponding key in HKCU for single-user installs). If you do not add this key, your product will not be recognized by UpdateStar.

Make sure your installer adds a DisplayVersion string to the registry key. If you do not add a DisplayVersion string, your product's version might not be recognized properly by UpdateStar.

Only use numbers separated by dots as your DisplayVersion value, e.g.
"4.100.12". Do not use letters or other characters in the DisplayVersion string, e.g. do not use "v5.x Alpha 3" as your DisplayVersion.

When assigning version numbers, remember that leading zeros in numbers are stripped when comparing versions, i.e. "4.06" is higher than "4.5". Also trailing zeros are significant, i.e. "4.50" is higher than "4.6".

Make sure that you update the installer information before you publish a new version. Preferably use a check list that you go through before every release.

Tip: Try to manually adjust version numbers in as few places as possible, preferably just one, and automatically insert version information read from this one place into all places where it is needed. Tools such as make, Ant, or MSBuild can aid in this process.