I'm running kodi on an Nvidia shield. When I turned it on today kodi gave me a message that hackers found a way to hack people's devices. It said there was a patch to fix this safety issue. Does kodi automatically update itself or do I have to update it manually? Do I have to delete the whole thing and reload it? I uploaded kodi to my shield from the google play store.
https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-v172-minor-bug-fix-and-security-release
You may have read in the news that malicious subtitle zip files could potentionally infect and harm your media player including Kodi. When Check Point researchers uncovered this flaw they contacted us up front to let us know about this flaw. Our developers fixed this secuity gap and have added the fix to this v17.2 release. As such we highly encourage all users to install this latest version! Any previous Kodi version will not get any security patch. We have began the roll out of this version and Android Play Store as well as Windows Store have this update pending and will roll out as soon as possible. Please be patient if you are using these store versions.
Google Playstore > My Apps > Update any if needed.
Your message is from an add-on source, tvaddons.ag.
If you installed from the Play Store is should have already update. Otherwise you need to do it yourself. Kodi also does not send messages. Which tells me you are using a build.
I would check with the build maker to make sure updating won't mess up his work. Normal installs of Kodi update right on top of the old one.