I’m the new maintainer of AwesomeTTS. It has a dedicated updater module: https://github.com/AwesomeTTS/awesometts-anki-addon/blob/7a1ea417eb606395089fb8616aa94294e94f80b5/awesometts/updates.py
this seems like over-engineering to me, an add-on shouldn’t have to manage its own updates. I read https://addon-docs.ankiweb.net/#/sharing?id=sharing-via-ankiweb , but it doesn’t mention anything about auto-updates. My intuition is that Anki will manage updates for addons, am I correct ?
yes.
You can check manually for updates from the add-ons dialog. Recent versions even automatically check for new versions every 24 hours.
Once anki detects a newer version on ankiweb it will download the new version and delete the whole old folder (except for stuff in user_files and your custom config). You need to restart Anki so that the new version is loaded.
the update mechanism was introduced with 2.1.
2.0 didn’t offer to check for updates - you had to reinstall