ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 2 -- United States Patent no. 12,487,816, issued on Dec. 2, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Software updating" was invented by Eric Bainville (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Ali Sazegari (Cupertino, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A novel software updating method is provided. A target file is divided into segments, where some segments are updated by patching, while other segments are updated by archiving. The segmentation of the update allows very large files such as DYLD shared caches to be patched in-place, i.e., by using free space available within the file to perform patching rather than requiring enough free space on disk to store both the new version...