I'm not the one asking about it, but yes, it would be important for the OP's question, because that runner that is getting re-installed each time(on android, not iOS) is the one that we are being advised to reinstall each update. The way Russell's quote appears to me is that because you can't stop an app from running on Android(as in Google has not provided a way) the only way to stop it is to force reinstall it. If that is happening, the new one would be overwriting the old one every time, and so we wouldn't have to reinstall it ourselves. In the case of iOS, and likely in the case of the Mac runner, we may have to reinstall, but it appears that in the case of Android we do not.
Ah, sorry. I quoted the wrong one.
Anyway, from what I understood, you have some version of the Android runner installed on your development computer, which ends up packaged with the game when you export it for Android use. Then, when it's installed on the Android, the Yoyo Games Android runner ON THE ANDROID re-installs automatically (because it's included in the final game export), but the runner ON YOUR COMPUTER doesn't update automatically when you update GM. And I also thought he was asking about the one on your computer, as that's what the error message seems to pertain to.
I don't know for sure if this is how it works, but it seems the most likely case to me. Basically, that error message is saying...
"If you update GM without updating the runner, the runner that's exported with your game may not have some recently added functionality that we used in the latest release of GM, so your game will glitch / crash / make your Android explode when you try to run it on the Android, because it's trying to use stuff that doesn't exist on the old, outdated runner that you're still exporting."
So...if it works the way I think it does, the runners for whatever system the game runs on will ALWAYS update automatically (to whichever version is included in the game itself; the one you had installed on your computer when you exported the game), regardless of which system it is. The runners on your computer, though (besides the Windows, Mac, and HTML5 runners), need to be updated manually, so that the one they programmed the newest version of GM around is included when you export your game. Now, this said, if the version of the runner included in your game is an older version than the version already on the playing system (Android), it might keep the newer version, or it might overwrite it with the older version...I can't take a guess at that one, because it depends on whether the OS uses the runner included in the game for THAT GAME ONLY, or if all games with a version of the runner install the runner to the same location, which would allow such a check and conditional overwrite.
Anyway, if someone knows for sure, I'm a bit curious now, too.
