Perhaps technical people should take more care when making updates for their application? There's a negative sentiment over updates for software and it arose from how bad updates ruining things. Updating might help with security, but it also forces you to put up with every harebrained UI change and removal of features that developers come up with.
Eg tab groups were pushed onto mobile users in Chrome, yet it feels like the people who made the UI change don't actually use mobile chrome much, because the UX is awful. Luckily you can trudge through flags to change this behavior to the old one, but how long until we can't do that anymore?
It is possible to separate security updates and other critical bug fixes from functional/UI changes. At least it is if you're any good at software development at all. The world would be a better place for users if more software developers still did that.
Of course you do need a strategy for maintaining multiple versions of something in that case instead of just forcing the latest version of everything you do on users whether they want it or not. With the lock-in effects of the always-connected web applications of today we all know which option makes more money.
I take some comfort in knowing that eventually most of the developers that force unwanted changes on their users will probably see their market share erode and lose their dominant positions. It's just unfortunate that we have so many quasi-monopolies in both essential and niche software products that it's going to take a long time for that to happen.
Users need to be motivated to upgrade. If their current software works sufficiently on the sites they care about, then they have no need to upgrade. If the sites themselves are enabling this behavior, by bending over backwards to work on with old browsers, then they are part of the “problem”.
I don’t like automatic updates and generally keep them disabled. Software upgrades tend to reduce functionality and instead force unnecessary UX redesigns on users, so I’d rather avoid them. I wish developers had the [EDIT: incentive] to release security patches independently from functionality changes, but few do that anymore, sadly.
I do not buy this. You're equating security updates with UI changes. Pointless UI changes get a lot more frustrating as you get older. What we really need is software with really long support versions that minimize bullshit churn in UI and usability.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I just don't see barriers in getting updates out to people as a good thing.
It seems your argument is that it encourages developers to be sloppy, but in practice I think it just ends up as a net loss for users as the average user just isn't interested in updating software, however critical the bugs in their current version. Maybe I'm different from the average user, but for me the fact that chrome has gone through 90+ versions over 10+ years without me having to think about it is great (and, I suspect, strongly correlated to the relative lack of security issues over the years despite it having a huge surface area).
In theory I like the idea that developers can now push useful updates to all of their customers like never before.
In practice, though, we see too many versions that are garbage. Why is that?
Google is far from the first offender (plenty of unnecessary redesigns and feature-removing "upgrades" coming from Apple and Microsoft too, say) but it's becoming a fundamental software architecture issue.
It's getting to the point where I want a 3-tiered set of app-updating preferences that says "low-level security updates and fixes are automatically OK", "prompt me for any new-feature updates" and "hell no on any re-peanut-buttering-of-the-UI updates".
Decades of force-feeding users unwanted features has trained them to not install updates. I know most people in my family flat out refuse to update software because they're afraid the developers will have decided to re-do the UI again, or move menu options around, or just break major functionality. So because we, as software engineers/companies, can't resist the urge to keep changing things and doing endless re-designs, end users are trained to not get the vital security updates they need.
As an industry we need to get better. A software update should mean things like "improved performance" and "better security", not "totally different UI" and "20 features nobody wants". If users really want the new shiny, it should be optional.
Perhaps we need to consider if something is wrong about this culture of constant upgrades.
Not just phone apps, but other applications too. Upgrades are actually hostile to the end user. There's nothing to counter the incentives of companies to keep sneaking in more ways to squeeze money out of their users.
Interestingly thinking back, I remember when I first discovered Chrome's aggressive autoupdate and I felt disquieted. Now I have a better sense that it's fundamentally not to the benefit of the end user. Actually there's some benefits for web developers, which tricks them into becoming part of this culture, and heavily pushing for these newer browsers with their built-in autoupdates now.
Software companies have trained me to not update my software. By now, when an update for an application or OS is available, I assume the new version is worse, and am usually right. Either I'm going to lose some functionality that I relied on, the UX is going to get shuffled around on me, or it's just going to get bigger and slower on my old machine.
Instead of doing automatic updates, I delay updating until the company forces me to choose between updating and not using the software--and only then do I make the hard choice. I wish that every software would provide security updates on a separate track from the usual "UX rewrite" and "Feature cram" downgrades. That way, I can stay on the oldest version (the one that works the best), yet get critical security updates so I can use it safely.
Web software, too! Reddit is the obvious example, but everywhere they're changing for the sake of change and usually making it worse. For example, Vanguard (the brokerage) recently did a site-wide update. They basically removed lots of critical functionality (including the only thing I actually visit their web site to do regularly) and replaced it with whitespace and fluff. For a while, they let you remain on the old site. Then they made it more difficult to find the link to the old site. Finally I got an E-mail saying that they'd charge my account a fee unless I "migrated" my account to the new site. Talk about end-user hostility. Now I just call them on the phone to do my rollovers, likely costing them more money. Good job, morons.
Sadly, I think people are starting to accept, as a fact of life, that software gets worse every time a developer touches it. People dread "upgrades" because it's going to get slower, buggier, the UI is going to change unnecessarily, and there's nothing they can do about it besides try to stay on the previous version, which is often impossible with web software.
And on top of that, most users want it to work the same it worked yesterday. Nothing drives me up the wall more than neverending stream of updates for anything and everything, be it PC, mobile, web, even cars. I understand it's great for job security and/or resume-filling, I just wish those developers would consider the difficulty of,for example, trying to explain to 60 years old nurse why the thing that worked yesterday doesn't work anymore or why it suddenly behaves differently.
Because of things like this I stopped updating apps a long time ago. But now many apps have a “phone home“ aspect, where it will literally lock you out of using the app if you don’t upgrade to the latest version every so often. Which is especially annoying if you need to approve a transaction that was blocked on your credit card but then you can’t do it until you update the app but your signal isn’t great, or you need to reply to a Facebook message but even though you can see the message the app refuses to function until you update. And a million other frustrating examples.
I miss the days of things not changing out from under me without me having any say about it. I remember a time when I looked forward to updates because they brought interesting new functionality or, you know, actually fixed bugs. And when I didn’t like a new version of something, I could simply go back and reinstall the old version and keep using that.
From the user's point of view, I can't think of a good reason to force users to update software, besides maybe a security/privacy issue. As a user, I expect software that works today to work tomorrow--forever. Every time I update, I risk getting a new UI shoved down my throat, or my favorite use case removed or broken, or the app has tripled in size for no discernible reason, or it's now too slow for my computer. I've been trained by software companies' repeated bad behavior to not update voluntarily unless I have some kind of assurance that it's purely a security update and no functionality has changed.
Version your API, figure out how to make maintaining the old versions zero cost, and don't throw users under the bus just because they are (understandably) unwilling to update.
As a user, it doesn't matter to me why software updates have degraded like this. All that matters is that they have.
As a developer, I don't really understand. I've been working on large, complex software that targets multiple operating systems for years, and we don't have any such issues.
It sounds to me like a lot of companies are using development methodologies that are a bit broken...
I've long thought that the reason for this is rather different -- the industry really wants to go to continuous-release models (which I don't think is a good thing, but that's a separate issue), which make security-only releases a bit nonsensical.
If I'm using an app, it already does what I want. An update might introduce a bug, so I can't use the app anymore. An update might remove an important feature from the app, and force me to spend time and effort searching for an alternative (particularly annoying if I've paid for it). These sorts of things happen frustratingly often.
For every app on every platform, I would like an LTS option which gets security fixes for a year with NO feature updates.
One of my pet peeves is that software always makes you take the good with the bad. You want the latest bug fixes and security updates, but you don’t want the added chat feature and UI redesign #12. But in order to get the former you also have to accept the latter. Companies should do a better job of maintaining old versions so you don’t have to take disruptive changes and feature cram just to patch a security hole.
I totally disagree with this philosophy. I do not want my software to be a living-breathing entity. My browser even less so. Security issues aside, I do not want to ever update until a new feature is released that compels me to upgrade. God knows how many times I've upgraded a perfectly good piece of software just to be greeted with unwanted bloat or regressions in features. I hate this trend towards removing the meaning of version numbers. Don't get me wrong, I understand the massive boon to security that this model will bring. But there's no reason why software can't auto-update just security releases.
I think people fear change in software because updates have a habit of making the user experience worse. Think of the troubling trend in web design where they take away customization options and add more padding to everything to be "mobile friendly".
Eg tab groups were pushed onto mobile users in Chrome, yet it feels like the people who made the UI change don't actually use mobile chrome much, because the UX is awful. Luckily you can trudge through flags to change this behavior to the old one, but how long until we can't do that anymore?
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