v4.1.1: Missing "owner" field in marketplace.json breaks Cowork sync

[davidepasseri-jpg]

Problem

Cowork marketplace sync fails with: "Marketplace-Synchronisierung fehlgeschlagen – Einige Plugins in diesem Marketplace weisen Validierungsfehler auf."

Users cannot update from v4.0.3 to v4.1.1.

Root Cause

The owner field was removed from .claude-plugin/marketplace.json in v4.1.1. This field is required by the Cowork marketplace schema (see Anthropic's knowledge-work-plugins marketplace as reference).

v4.0.3 (working):

{
  "name": "bettercallclaude-marketplace",
  "owner": { "name": "Federico Cesconi" },
  "plugins": [...]
}

v4.1.1 (broken):

{
  "name": "bettercallclaude-marketplace",
  "plugins": [...]
}

Fix

Add the owner field back to .claude-plugin/marketplace.json:

{
  "name": "bettercallclaude-marketplace",
  "owner": {
    "name": "Federico Cesconi"
  },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "bettercallclaude",
      "description": "Swiss Legal Intelligence -- BGE/ATF/DTF precedent research, case strategy, legal drafting, and citation verification across all 26 Swiss cantons with Anwaltsgeheimnis privacy protection.",
      "source": "./bettercallclaude"
    }
  ]
}

Environment

• Cowork Desktop App (March 2026)
• BetterCallClaude v4.0.3 installed, attempting update to v4.1.1

[fedec65]

Thank you Davide! Much appreciated!!!

[fedec65]

A few observations from the investigation:

• Obs 9935: "Schema Inconsistency: Official KWP Marketplace Retains Owner Field" — the official Anthropic plugins kept owner, suggesting it's part of the expected schema
• Obs 9936: "Local Desktop Uploads Marketplace Confirms Owner Field Is Standard"
• Obs 9939–9940: "Current Marketplace Add Attempts Show Silent Failures" — installs were silently failing after the field was stripped

The sequence of events:

1. owner.name was stripped from marketplace.json as part of the v4.1.1 "KWP minimal schema" experiment
2. The CI validation check for owner.name was also removed (PR fix: remove stale owner.name check from CI marketplace validation #8) — but that was treating the symptom, not the cause
3. Cowork Desktop's marketplace parser likely requires owner to be present to register the plugin properly, and without it, installs/updates fail silently (no error shown to the user)

The fact that Cowork users were affected more visibly makes sense — Cowork users are more dependent on the GUI update flow, while CLI users might reinstall manually and not notice the broken auto-update path.

The fix landed in the latest remote main commit restoring that field. Worth watching whether the Cowork Update button now appears reliably for users.

Once again thanks @davidepasseri-jpg