We really don't want to be like other driver updaters which rely on turning basic functionality into premium features or tricking users into installing adware.
Their owners also spend a lot of resources in advertising on the Internet. They pay major bloggers and websites to write articles about their software and pay websites to place them prominently. A lot of people know about these products, but SDI isn't even on the radar.
Snappy Driver Installer was first released in February 2014. It started out as a fork/rewrite of DriverPack Solutiоn which differentiated from it by having no adware, no premium features, being faster(hence its name), taking great care in picking best matched drivers, not leaving traces in systems and being honest to users.
Previously I worked on DriverPack Solutiоn(DPS) and made significant contributions to it. It's worth mention that it's a commercially successful project and its annual revenue is about $1 000 000. I worked as a volunteer and made no attempt to claim any of that money. DriverPack Solutiоn uses the same old driver matching engine that I wrote a long time ago and no one touched it since I quit the project because no one else understand how it works. While the software hasn't been updated since 2013, a new version comes out each month thanks to SamLab's driverpacks. Users are already used to its defects such as installing touchpad drivers on desktops, installing both Realtek and Creative at the same time, scripting errors, etc. SamLab still tries to make his driverpacks compatible with DPS but it causes bloating of driverpacks because in order to trick DPS into installing the correct driver, he has to duplicate the same driver multiple times. Also he can't include some drivers because DPS would renders PCs unbootable trying installing them. I'm not fixing these issues because I no longer support DPS and users better off using SDI anyway.
Even though SDI outperformed DPS in every way and doesn't include any adware, DPS is vastly more popular and recognized. It has to do with the fact АrtX put a lot resources into advertising and trying to capitalize on adware. His employee went on saying on forums that they target housewives because they're easily tricked into installed adware and don't complain about poorly picked drivers due to not being tech-savvy.
I need to give some backstory explaining how I get involved in the first place. There's not much information about the project on English speaking forums, so hopefully people will be able to piece it together to get a better idea on how things unfolded.
Back in 2009 I started working as a PC technician at a company that had over 1000 PCs and there was no Internet due to a security policy. So I started looking for software that would help me with installing drivers.
The best one that I found was Driver Pack Autorun(it was re-branded as DriverPack Solutiоn some time later). It used driverpacks from driverpack.net(they're meant to be slipstreamed into Windows installation discs) and rely on DPInst.exe to do the actual installation. At the time it didn't support 64-bit systems, couldn't update drivers(only missing drivers were installed), didn't provide information about drivers that are available for installation. Users were supposed to click on red mark and hopefully red marks turns into green marks. You can see how it looked back then on Wikipedia(
link).
The software was advertised as being released under GPL. I joined the project in 2009 and put source code at Google Code, so that multiple people could participate in the development at the same time. Over time I made significant contributions such as support for 64-bit systems, changed GUI to displaying list of drivers instead of list of driverpacks, optimizing for speed(indexation of 700MB driverpacks used to take about 6 hours on my PC), added tooltips displaying information about drivers, rewrote driver matching engine(that improved chances of finding the best matched driver and enabled updated old drivers).
However I had some disagreements with its founder(АrtX).
I was arguing for providing as much information about drivers as possible while АrtX wanted to show users only one big button "Install all". I was opposing keeping records in registry about drivers that failed to be installed, so that DriverPack Solutiоn wouldn't be suggesting installing them again because it deceived users(it looked like drivers were successfully installed). I also opposed stuff like forcing adware on users, changing home pages, OEM logos, loading from the Internet JavaScripts and many other things I'm having trouble recalling.
At one point АrtX decided to make new version available only for users who ordered DVDs with the software. New version was advertised as having brand new driver matching engine, speed improvements, 64-bit support, ability to update drivers, creating log files. All these improvements were made by me and I opposed forcing users to pay for that. I didn't mind АrtX taking all money from DVD sales(it's a good service for people with slow/expensive Internet) for as long as the new version would be available for free. Negotiations didn't go too well. АrtX end up making new version available only via paid DVD.
Website said it would be released for everyone on March 1st.
When March 1st came, the note was changed to March 15th.
When March 15th came, the note was removed all together.
The new version finally appeared on April 20th but was heavily loaded with adware.
АrtX put the source code into his own private source code repository breaking his promise of being Open Source. I continued working on public repository at Google Code where I made further improvements into its core functionality. SamLab kept updating driverpacks and releasing SamDrivers each month. It included my version of DPS since it was free of adware and it was on the cutting edge at the time. Eventually АrtX merged his private branch back into public Google Code. While it brought some improvements to GUI, it also brought some nasties which included adware and encrypted scripts. It took me same time to clean it up make it easy to disable, so that SamLab could include DPS in his SamDrivers.
DriverPack Solutiоn is written in JavaScript. АrtX choose it because he was familiar it. Over years I tried to push it to the limit but JavaScript isn't meant to do heavy lifting and some problems with DPS couldn't be solved without a major redesign. This is why wrote Snappy Driver Installer from scratch in C++ and the rest is history.
