>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it".<p>I turned off auto-updates on my phone.<p>So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it blocked the UI with the message: "You haven't updated the app in a month. Uber won't work if you don't update it right now." It really rustled my jimmies. In the next 15 minutes, 3 of us (2 are foreigners with no cell connection) had to stand in the freezing rain when the damn thing was updating with my 2.5G connection. When the Uber arrived, I had 1% left and not long after I got in the car, my phone shut down. I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived.<p>The other day I talked about how backward-compatible Google Maps is and unfortunately it made the news on Slashdot. Some people were like, oh yeah, Windows is backward compatible with 30 years old apps. Are you a millennial/a shill for praising them for supporting their API for 10 years? Yeah, keep talking about Windows, until you fucking use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them in a month.
Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest security benefit I can think of for a normal user. Yes you read that right. It's f*cking great that my parents can use an always up to date browser and OS and I don't need to worry if they have updated all their stuff. Update mechanisms like for Java and other stuff which pop-up and require user interaction are a thing most people will not get right.
Actually I really like the Chrome OS approach where it's done continuesly in the background. Not all people want to know what's going on under the hood and how the motor of their car works exactly. Some people just want to drive securely from A to B.
You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464</a>
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I just reactivated my old Android phone yesterday for fun and as soon as I put the sim card in the phone started blowing up with notifications about old voicemails, ones I never saw on my iPhone I had just had it in. There were about a dozen voicemails from the past six months from jobs I had applied to and heard nothing back from, or had a preliminary phone interview with, asking me to call them back to schedule something. I mentioned it to my sister, who moved from Android to iPhone the same time I did, and she did the same thing and found a bunch of voicemails from a college she's recently applied to asking if she can send them some piece of paperwork. It's so frustrating that we didn't know that these voicemails existed.<p>I think the fundamental problem is that to make these technical products like mobile OS's and email apps you need to be so far into tech that you can't really imagine what it's like to be a casual user. This is why I don't consider software engineering to be on the same tier as other disciplines of engineering. Yes, civil engineers make bridges, but they use them in daily life exactly the same as regular people do - the same goes for electrical engineers and power in the home, and mechanical engineers and vacuums/air conditioners/bicycles. When you make software, you look at all software differently and you lose the perspective of a regular person.
And the worst part, for me, is that we engineers are inflicting this upon eachother, driven by money and business-types with lock-in business-models.<p>We desperately need a code of conduct for engineers.<p>And/or we need certain types of businessmodel to become outlawed.
This is why I go out of my way to only buy phones that are going to be very well supported by LineageOS for a long time.<p>You can go Google-less on such devices if you want.<p>The only real limitation is that you cannot do anything about the super-privileged proprietary modem that simultaneously can spy on you at any time that also prevents you from running newer kernels on your hardware because of how evil every Android vendor is with their proprietary bits.<p>At least there is finally momentum to kill the ME / SP backdoors on desktops. Its going to be much harder to do that on mobile since the only way to use cellular networks is through these proprietary black box modems.
We were afraid that AI will take over and take away our freedom, but I think some companies have done a great job at ruining their products, and our lives as well.
It's an interesting (but mostly depressing) problem. The insistence that "others must be in control of what you own" doesn't really sit well with me, at all. I won't drive a phone without root, for instance. Otherwise the plethora of updates I have sitting around not being updated would do nothing but eat data with garbage updates with naught but a new roll of advertisements and, if you're unlucky, new garbage access requests. Update the os? Yeah, no. Not on your watch, at least.<p>A firewall, for instance, is a basic necessity. Even the crude android flavors. It includes the ability to lock out your "vendors" selectively and accurately.<p>My build is, hm, approaching it's fourth year, I think. No auto updates save for select apps. No complaints. No surprises. But I'm special, I don't do "phone for fun" and so have a fairly limited and hardened short list of requirements.<p>The most annoying thing on android is Google XXANY - by a wide, wide margin. I'll be itching to build a google-go-around on my next handset, for certain.<p>Save all those apps you like, for sure, I still depend on side-loading quite a few that have since gone by the wayside. At this juncture I have to take absolutely every bit of control that I can get my filthy paws wrapped around.
I understand that powers have shifted, and the majority of the people prefer "free" email/chat/spreadsheets/storage, when "free" means "welcome to our own special walled corner of the internet, give us your personal data and watch these ads".<p>But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay <i>once</i> for hardware or software, that puts the <i>user</i> first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale?
So, back to land lines with analog phones?<p>Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated.<p>I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
I have an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 (jailbroken of course) and an original MBP retina running Mavericks. I don't update them because the risk of updating is higher than the risk of not updating. Right now everything is working, and everything is set up the way I like it. If I don't update, things might break some day, but there is also a greater-than-zero chance that everything will continue to work for quite a while. If I update, those odds drop to zero. Not even a statistical approximation of zero, but actually zero. Updating is just trading one set of risks for a different set of risks. I choose the devil I know.
Also these updates drain the battery all the time and there is no way to tell them to please stop.<p>At least on Android you can install "greenify app" but for that to work properly, you need to have root and for that you have to unlock the bootloader (for which you have to wait 14 days and also void your warranty). I mean wtf, it's my phone but the design is such that a shit ton of crap always needs to run in the background (looking at you google play services) and dozens of useless apps that are always connecting just to show me more push notifications.
Agreed. Looking forward to when I get my new phone: <a href="https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/" rel="nofollow">https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/</a>
I can choose whether apps auto update on iOS devices but more importantly, when I download something on my computer, I have no control of what the app does. On my iOS device, I can be somewhat assured that it's going to be somewhat trapped in a sandbox and only be allowed to do what I specifically give it permission to do.<p>I wish that Apple would give you an option to not allow an app to access the internet and not just disallow the use of mobile data.
Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box hardware.
When obtaining new apps or devices, you can’t tell if it is a worthwhile investment because it could break in any number of ways. For your money, are you buying 2 weeks of functionality or 5 years of it? It’s not even enough to have a reputable seller because good apps are sold to terrible companies that ruin them later, or the developer just decides to add new money-making schemes later.<p>It seems that we need more guarantees (legally enforceable, i.e. you said you wouldn’t update your gizmo to do X but you did so I get compensation).
The GDPR is going in the right direction by creating a "bill of rights" for your data, so ownership is firmly delineated and all 3rd party use of data revolves around clear revokable granular consent.<p>What we need now is a "bill of rights" defining and preserving the notion of ownership for digital devices. Part of that should be that the device should only do what it's explicitly asked to do. Updates should be opt-in in nearly all cases, and mandatory updates should meet stringent requirements similar to vaccines. That is, only to combat major threats that apply to users as a group.
Yeah, I feel that too.<p>After pressing the "later" button every time I picked up my iPhone for a few weeks Apple quit asking and updated the "iOS" this past month.<p>It has "new features" they keep telling me I need and I've been pressing buttons to ignore their "Learn how to use the new..." prompts since then.<p>With the exception of security updates I'd like very much if Apple left my phone alone but it's not really "my phone". I just have a license to use it and it says they can make changes to it.<p>The way that's been working for me does not entice me to buy new phones from Apple.
That's exactly how I feel about software ever since I got acquainted with windows 10. Do you best to remove all the junk. Then they keep reinstalling their "malware" until they finally remove the option of disabling or removing their malware.<p>It feels like we are losing more control and access over tech - both software and hardware. Some companies are trying their best to turn tech into a black box which we aren't allowed to peer into.
Especially nice when the updates break your computer, as it happened for a lot of people with the Spectre mitigations.<p>I dread the Internet of Things.
> "Thankfully, running a System Restore worked and the next update didn't have these problems, but since then I stopped allowing automatic updates"<p>It is now possible to disable automatic updates in Windows 10?
(Asking because forced updates is what made me switch to Linux in the first place.)
The real issue is loss of control. “Ask me again later” is dehumanizing because it robs the user of agency. I can’t imagine how a forced windows ten update would have felt. Studies have shown (not to mention common sense) that a feeling of lack of agency is depressing. I recently quit the Mac OS after 20 years of rabid fandom, over the feeling that I wasn’t the one in charge of my Mac. Linux still lets me own my gear and I have to say that a few unpolished areas are worth the renewed sense of agency. Unfortunately there’s no user positive answer for mobile. Android is even worse than iOS. Maybe the black phone will free us from this insanity and put the user first again.
Now I fell that I can't buy a piece of hardware or install a software that doesn't install an server and an update service. My powerful desktop machine has dozens of services, from Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Razer, Logitech, etc.<p>I must turn them all off by hand.
First you had the motherboard, processor and ram. Now they are on one board. 3x less control. Plus you want a super slim design so you cannot get a desktop anymore. Actually you've never been more in control of your own hardware. Tiny teams make their own computer like the Raspberry Pi now.
First thing I thought after reading the headline was "another windows user complaining about updates" and i think that's just how it is after reading the whole article. The author shows up some problematic points of the development of handling updates. But if he spend the time thinking about these problems in actively doing something about it, there only would be a few things left to complain about.
I'm sure there are some services that are not replaceable and use update methods like mentioned in the article. But this doesn't happens by accident. If the developes of a service choose such update methods, either it's likely that you can see some other problematic decisions the developers made, or the old service you are trying to run is not safe to run and has to be updated before it's safe to run.
As i notice such problematic decisions, I avoid these services or search for alternatives before I would complain about it, and this never happend.
As a developer, it makes sense to break backward-compatibility if only a very small percentage of your user base is using the old version. Supporting old versions often requires extra resources that I can otherwise spend on building new features.
Apple won't even let me delete auto-downloaded iOS updates anymore. They just download when I'm not paying attention, in the background, and take up anywhere from 500mb to 1gb of hard drive space, forever. Unless of course, I update.
If there are enough people that don't want stuff to happen, it won't happen. Unfortunately you are in a minority. People do have power and choice.
I have a HP zbook laptop that cost me about 3500 euro's. Recently I changed some trivial settings in the BIOS. After I saved and reboot the laptop hung at the bios stage. There was no way to get back into the bios and the keyboard was blinking a code that I had to contact HP.<p>They had to replace the entire motherboard due to a corrupted BIOS. So it was caused by a bug? The repair cost were about 800 euro's..
New version of Skype RT and Opera Browser have no option to disable automatic updates. Probably they understand that nobody wants their updates that only bring new bugs and more ads.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything except for pocket. I've never had a service like that become so integrated in my life so fast. I don't even use bookmarks anymore, it's just easier to pool it all together and tag it relevantly. The suggested news is astoundingly fine tuned to my interests as well, much more so than other services that claim to do the same thing. It's become my favorite time killer now just to go through my suggested articles.<p>Now if only they can keep from screwing with it and mucking up the great service with updates. They could literally do nothing else to it and I'll be a lifelong user. I'm not optimistic though...