`install.sh --channel dev` set the channel in the installer and nowhere else. The app kept its `stable` default, stable advertises 0.1.0, and 0.1.0 is older than any dev build — so every update check said "up to date", forever, and the user had to know to go set it themselves. The installer now records the channel as a plain file in the app-data dir; the app adopts it at startup. A file rather than a write into the app's SQLite store, because shell has no business knowing that schema. Adoption compares against the value last adopted, not against "is the pref unset". Seeding only when unset would have fixed the first install and left the second silently wrong: install stable, then install dev, and the pref is already set so dev never takes. Comparing to the last marker makes both directions work — an in-app channel switch survives the next launch, and re-running the installer on a different channel is honoured. An unreadable marker is ignored rather than read as `stable`, so a truncated file can't move someone off the channel they're on.