Hi,
Please post the full error message, maybe the plugin files on your site are not writable so they can’t be updated, or there’s a connection issue? I tried to update HivePress on a test installation and it seems to work.
There’re no front-end changes, but I rebuilt the whole framework from scratch and this will speed up the development and ease the maintenance, there’re huge improvements in API, caching, queries etc. Also a few minor features (message storage limit, review submission options etc.) and there were a lot of minor bug fixes (reported on the forum). Please let me know if you find any new bugs, I’m sure there will be because there’s a new codebase.