Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer connect at startup to crashes.seriflabs.com

[neville]

Interesting to see that both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer each initiate outbound network connections to the address crashes.seriflabs.com as soon as you launch them.

 

That name was chosen to avoid suspicion about the reason for phoning home?

[Patrick Connor]

neville,

 

The name of the server was chosen during the beta phase when we were particularly using it to monitor crashes, which we still do with the customer beta builds. However we have another service on there which tells the program the latest version so that the program can decide whether to tell you that there is an update available. Yes the server name is a little odd, but it is actually a call to check for updates to the software. It only passes Program name (designer or photo) operating system (currently only windows) and application type (release or trial or beta) that is all. The call is http and looks like this 

 

Designer Release call

GET /appversion.php?product=designer&os=windows&apptype=release HTTP/1.1
Host: crashes.seriflabs.com

Reply

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 03 May 2017 12:27:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Amazon) PHP/5.4.23
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.23
Content-Length: 134
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "schema": 1,
    "version": {
        "major": "1",
        "minor": "5",
        "build": "2",
        "revision": "58"
    }
}

Photo Release call 

GET /appversion.php?product=photo&os=windows&apptype=release HTTP/1.1
Host: crashes.seriflabs.com

Reply

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 03 May 2017 12:28:46 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.6 (Amazon) PHP/5.4.23
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.23
Content-Length: 134
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "schema": 1,
    "version": {
        "major": "1",
        "minor": "5",
        "build": "1",
        "revision": "54"
    }
}

 

So when we release an updated version the software will compare it's version to the 'latest' returned by crashes.seriflabs.com/appversion.php and display the option to the user to update. If the version returned by the server is the same as the software it displays nothing. The Windows store  and Mac App store take care or updates for you, but we have to do this ourselves.

[neville]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Patrick.