I had issues in the past with colleagues who never update software manually, and whose Seafile clients were no longer sync’ing correctly after I upgraded the Seafile server. I had to ask each of them to update the Seafile client manually and ignore the “You are running the latest version” message because it’s wrong. Clearly, the “latest version” from the auto-update is not guaranteed to work with the latest server.
If you didn’t have any issue then I suspect you have upgraded regularly, so you just happened to never be caught off guard. That doesn’t mean your experience reflects 99%+ of others, and it is still irrelevant to the subject at hand, which is that “Auto update” does not work. It should be removed if it’s not maintained instead of misleading users and sys admins. It also makes the product look sloppy (wonder if anything else is broken).
Really, detecting available updates never worked on several machines (macOS) over at least four years for me, so I think it’s definitely broken and has been for a long time, but nobody seems to care (see Github issues https://github.com/haiwen/seafile-client/issues/1282 and https://github.com/haiwen/seafile-client/issues/1202) However, removing the misleading, because dysfunctional, option would be the least if a functioning update checker cannot be provided.
As I already wrote, client update almost never worked for me, neither Seafile Client nor SeaDrive Client. Don’t know, which setup you use, @shoeper. Glad that it works for you, but obviously not for many other users.
Digging up a very old topic but this problem still persists. Been running v8.0.6 for a while now, had reason to check the software download page which showed v8.0.7 was available. Except check for updates doesn’t work:
Still a problem. Seafile 8.0.6 didn’t spot any of the new versions and after manually updating to v8.0.10, this version didn’t spot v9.0.1.
Has anyone every had the automatic client update work? If not, then one might raise a request to get the suggestion it doesn’t automatic updates removed. We’ll add it to the (short list) of modern client software that requires manual intervention. Hint not very good
It worked in the past. But they disabled it completely for some reason that don’t make sense to me, since everyone can disable this setting when not desired.
Well if that’s the case (and it’s been disabled for the past 4 major versions), they should remove any reference to automatic updates from the user interface. Although that is the wrong answer - I get heavily involved in Cyber Essentials these days and any software that doesn’t auto update or at least warn when there is a new update is frowned upon.
Still the wrong answer IMO. Their direct competitor Nextcloud is very aggressive about updates and that’s good. Only problem with Nextcloud is that every client updates requires a reboot which is darn annoying.
(see Github issues 
