The in-app updater and the unattended timer both target the public
rcourtman/Pulse community assets, so a Pro install that used them was
silently downgraded to community. Guard 2 (983a89326) blocked in-app
apply on the Pro edition, which stopped the downgrade but left Pro
installs with no update path except manual portal downloads. That
friction is a plausible driver of the runtime split: as of 2026-07-08
only 10 of 66 active paid licenses have any Pro-runtime install.
Root fix: the compiled Pro binary now checks and applies updates
through the license server download broker (GET /v1/downloads/pulse-pro
with the installation token and instance fingerprint). The check
compares against the broker's pinned private release instead of GitHub,
respecting the stable/rc channel guard. Apply re-resolves fresh signed
R2 URLs at apply time, verifies the archive against the same pinned
pulse-installer SSHSIG key plus the broker manifest sha256, and refuses
GitHub-shaped download URLs outright. An unactivated Pro binary still
refuses with the portal fallback. The community edition path is
unchanged.
The update banner restores in-app apply for auto-updatable Pro
deployments and keeps the portal instructions for deployments the
updater cannot drive (Docker). scripts/pulse-auto-update.sh now skips
when the installed binary reports Pulse Pro so the unattended timer can
never reinstall community over Pro.
Note: internal/updates/pro_update.go and manager_pro_update_test.go for
this change landed one commit early inside 313552deb via a parallel
session committing a shared staged index; this commit completes the
wiring they belong to.