Any ideas why MacOS arm64 downloads of Sigil have skyrocketed?

[KevinH]

Hi All,

I am looking for some insight if anyone has any. For years total download counts for any one version of Sigil were about 60k-80k for Windows with both versions for MacOS totaling only about 1/4th of the Windows level. About level with MacOS market share.

With recent releases MacOS arm64 has jumped to reach rough parity with Windows.

Now with the very latest 2.8.1 release Windows downloads roughly hit 50k but the MacOS arm64 downloads just broke 100K.

Was there some blogger that discovered Sigil and pushed it in the MacOS world?

Any ideas on why Sigil is seeing such a change in platform usage?

[rantanplan]

Apple is putting up notifications if you run Intel code on arm64 devices and that support will be discontinued next year. With the latest update the messages got a bit more pushy. Maybe that's the reason?

[KevinH]

MacOS intel never had more than 5K downloads in recent years. If all moved to arm64, it would be a minor blip, not the 80k extra macOS users we are seeing.

[rantanplan]

Strange. I don't think it's AI for once because I'd assume that they only crawl the Linux versions.

[DiapDealer]

I found this site: https://sigil.macupdate.com/ whose Sigil download links silently redirect to our github release downloads. I can't imagine this one causing all of the recent increases, but perhaps there's more out there like it?

>>> https://download.macupdate.com/action/download-silicon/33395

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>>> https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil/releases/download/2.8.1/Sigil.app-2.8.1-Mac-arm64.txz

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For what it's worth... 302 redirects are not generally recommended for this sort of thing. 302s are typically reserved for targets that are temporarily unavailable but are expected to return soon. But at least they're not trying to "steal" the SEO ranking for their new download urls by using a 301. Which I suppose is rather nice of them actually.

[DiapDealer]

Although that site seems to be a fairly popular source of free macOS software. They even have an app (complete with an integrated update notifier) for the macOS desktop.

[DiapDealer]

There also appears to be an alternative App Store for macOS called AppLite https://applite.app/. But I cannot verify that it has Sigil (or that it redirects to our downloads) without installing it. But between sites like these (and don't forget Homebrew casks that download our installers), perhaps these alternative AppStores are the reason?

[KevinH]

Never used or even heard of that site in my life. But I am hardly a typical macos user anymore.

[KevinH]

Wow, their description of Sigil is so very very outdated, No mention of PageEdit at all but WYSIWYG and no epub3 mentioned.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Wow, their description of Sigil is do very very outdated, No mention of PageEdit at all but WYSIWYG and no epub3 mentioned.

One of the commenters noted that Sigil hasn't been wysiwyg for quite some time. PageEdit was mentioned in the comments as well.