During the discussions for the release of openSUSE 12.3, the topic of update notifications and applets was brought up again. Originally openSUSE shipped with a custom update applet, but since it was basically unmaintained, the decision was made to switch to Apper for openSUSE 12.2 The original Apper used in that version had a number of issues, which the upstream developer (Daniel Nicoletti) fixed in a newer version, which also had a lot of other improvments.