I am new to the M1 Apple Silicon world but am now on a Mac Studio. I did a complete refresh to ensure I started on the right foot with AS/Universal applications, and I have the Silicon app installed to see which Intel-Only Apps still need to be updated.
The list is long - mainly smaller utilities or HW-specific apps... Should I expect an update to, for instance, Audacity to show up suddenly, or would I have to actively find an AS version and install it? I use MacUpdater to keep my apps updated.
Who knows. I think Apple encourages developers to publish one Universal app, so presumably when something goes from Intel-only to Universal, its normal update mechanism would roll out that update...
... that being said, there are a number of software developers who publish separate ARM vs Intel versions, e.g. SecureCRT, raindrop.io, Spotify, VLC, etc. (Those are the ones I remember on my M1 Max machine) I wonder if MacUpdater would alert you to the existence of a separate ARM version if you have the Intel version... but otherwise I would expect you'd have to manually grab the ARM version.
(Note that there are some developers who "pretend" to give you an ARM-only version but in reality they publish a Universal version for ARM and an Intel-only version otherwise. Same issue with those, I would presume the Intel versions won't update to the Universal one unless they abandon the Intel-only version. I thought Chrome/Firefox were in that category but the versions on my Intel Macs are Universal. Zoom might be one...)