If you manually installed the app rather than through Play, Play will not prompt about an update. If your Android has less than 4GB of RAM installed, the app won't be offered through Play at all.
To answer the staging question: Play doesn't present updates to everyone at once. I'm not sure who controls the distribution, the publisher or Google, or the algorithm that determines who gets it when.
Automatically switching power modes in high winds is a great idea, but that should be in the firmware and not the app. You don't want to have an app make flight control decisions like that.