During the development and testing phase of a SharePoint 2013 Hosted App, the information I was reading described the app update process in a way which had left me:

• A bit uncertain if I needed to use Visual Studio to complete the upgrade
• Fairly certain that I needed to either wait 24 hours or execute a command in the SharePoint Management Shell, as described in the App for SharePoint update process article, in order to for the upgraded app to become available.
  • Note: I’m working in O365, so I can’t run timer jobs and that means I’d still need to wait for Internal App State Update to execute
  • Even when we can force the timer job to run, we’re now taking several heavy steps just to update our app

It turns out that one doesn’t need Visual Studio nor must one wait and/or execute the Set-SPInternalAppStateUpdateInterval command and/or force Internal App State Update to run. We can accomplish everything in the browser.

Let’s assume that you’re working in the “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools environment, you’ve published a new update of your app with the version revised, and you’ve uploaded that version to the App Catalog. Now, you go to your staging site, but you likely won’t see the “An update for this app is available” text in ‘Site Contents’ listing for your app. What you can do then is, click the ellipsis, and select ‘Details’:

You’ll be redirected to the App Details page, and when loaded, click the “App Profile” link:

And, from here, the UI to complete the upgrade is pretty self explanatory.

Categories: SharePoint, Software Development

Tags: Development, SharePoint