>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".
I turned off auto-updates on my phone.
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.
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.
is an interesting choice of example. The anger at updates only really makes sense for apps that are entirely local to your hardware. As soon as you have an app where part of it runs on a server that you don't control, that logic goes out the window. They can stop your non-updated app from working with no effort, just by making the server API incompatible. As long as you are depending on someone else's server to be up and responding and not changing, you give up your rights to be in control of local updates.
It sucks, but that's the reality of SaaS. I'm a fan of using local apps whenever possible. For instance, Google Docs is just too damn useful not to use sometimes. But I still, majority of the time, will choose to use a local word processor whenever I can get away with it. And when I'm done working on a Google Docs project, I download it in several formats and put it in the drawer.
In the meantime I'd really like to see more take-up of open source, federated hosted solutions based on open document standards and open protocols. But so far the big corporations are winning that game.
The anger is still valid because at the end of the day, the software (that used to work) no longer works due to a choice made by the company that makes the software. To the end user there is no difference between "making a breaking API change on the server" and "pushing a native update that disables the app".
This may be the current sucky reality of SaaS, but it could be fixed if the market demanded it.
Ah, yes sorry, I do agree with that. The company is changing things. It does suck. The main difference is just that with SaaS, when they change the server, they change something for everyone, there is no way to really block it. With local apps, you can block updates.*
I'm not so much angry about server-based apps changing things, although I see your point, but I am angry about too many server-based apps in the first place. At least when it's not necessary. Hard to argue when it's literally for a social network.
* Although in practice this only works for so long as it gets more and more painful as time passes.. there are still users of Windows XP! But I'm sure it's far from a pleasant experience these days.
Don't forget about forking. Lack of source code might not matter for the 98% of application users, but the remaining 2% can modify it for everyone. If people don't like the new direction of OpenOffice or MySQL, they make LibreOffice and MariaDB. People should value nerds and their needs more.
> but it could be fixed if the market demanded it.
Meaning, effectively, that it will not be fixed.
I understand the frustration. I work on a mobile application that, like Uber, relies on a lot of server-side communication and deliberately stops working if the client is out of date. And I do know that this sucks.
But the reality is, our API is non-public, and so there is no pressure from anyone to maintain backward compatibility. And I have a thousand features that need to ship, with not enough time as it is, or I will start getting heat from management. Abandoning the cadence of "constant breaking changes bundled with client updates" would slow development considerably, for no gain except the one-hundredth-of-one-percent of HN weirdos who care about this stuff. It's just not going to happen.
Ignoring the lame slur, it's not just people that care about computing freedom. It's also people with terrible connections and extremely limited data plans. Being forced to download a 40MB app update just to look at a few KB of data is a deal-breaker for many people.
> but it could be fixed if the market demanded it.
The market (my mom for example) is unaware there is a fix.
> there is no pressure from anyone to maintain backward compatibility.
You and your manager are both part of the problem. And the phone makers, because they invented a market place for shit companies that wants to ship unfinished software and push daily updates to their users to eventually reach a point where their API is stable.
There used to exist software developers who took great pride in (API) backwards compatibility. These days, where are they? My guess is they have been overrun by the a huge crowd of new people who have never maintained a backwards compatible API and who don't know how to. Management love fast-moving people who say "yes sir" and "not a problem sir".
This is a good point too. There are people unaware of the better way! The world is coming, where one day there won't be anyone left alive who remembers things like:
1. Software that would work, un-modified, for decades.
2. Software that worked without access to some back-end.
3. Software that didn't require permission from a third party to run.
4. Software that didn't collect personal data from users.
5. Having root/admin access to your own computer/devices.
We can still prevent this from coming true, but it's going to happen if nobody pushes back on these practices.
There is no money in selling software apart from a service these days. Part of it is due to the open source movement and expectation that the software is free while you pay for support/services. Software as an entity that you buy apart from a service has been devalued.
I'll brush off your sneer at my perceived lack of ability. Of course I can do API back-compatibility. But everything comes at a cost that has to be weighted against the corresponding benefit, and the apparent benefit (to management) in this case is near-zero: most people don't care, and the ones who do care aren't going to single out and stop using our app because of it, because all the other apps do it as well. It is, unfortunately, a coordination problem that is not likely to be solved anytime soon.
> I'll brush off your sneer at my perceived lack of ability.
This is an admirable sentiment. Thank you for making HN a better place.
> But everything comes at a cost that has to be weighted against the corresponding benefit, and the apparent benefit (to management) in this case is near-zero
Software can have virtues that do not present short-term benefits, but instead contribute to a wholesome UX, even to captive users. It is the responsibility of the software developer to make these hard calls and stick to their guns in the face of management pressure.
It didn't have to end up that way. The data is behind a cloud API because data is a source of power and the API is a control point. Whatever data the uber app needs could have been on his phone or in a cdn close to his phone or in a cloud computer operating on the user's behalf instead of for Uber. The balance of power has shifted asymmetrically towards centralized entities, but it does not mean that is the only possible solution. It is mostly a history lesson to understand why the balance today is what it is. It could have been different. Humans made all this stuff, there's no laws of nature saying software distributed systems only work if a megacorp is positioned in the center of it. Consider the world wide web.
Yes, and as in your web example, the economic dynamics can sometimes point the other way, providing a strong incentive to maintain compatibility with an installed base that's not really under the service operator's control.
People providing services can argue a lot about the limitations for them of this situation and the advantages of having more control:
> It sucks, but that's the reality of SaaS. I'm a fan of using local apps whenever possible. For instance, Google Docs is just too damn useful not to use sometimes. But I still, majority of the time, will choose to use a local word processor whenever I can get away with it. And when I'm done working on a Google Docs project, I download it in several formats and put it in the drawer.
Out of curiosity, would you pay for a standalone Google Docs that worked locally and pushed data to a server (say, a daemon you can also purchase and run in your home computer or droplet) only when you wanted to sync? If you are willing to pay, Microsoft offers much of this through Sharepoint + Office.
The desktop version absolutely does not have that requirement, you just have to buy the right one. Office 2016 can be installed and used offline without ever talking to a Microsoft server. You're referring to a restriction specific to the Office365 version. If you don't want cloud requirements, don't buy the cloudy version.
You know, "buying the right one" Microsoft product can easily be a full time job. That is, if it is even possible. I was under the impression that the only version of Office available was the 365.
But anyway, my workplace brought some version with a clear requirement of getting an eternal license on it. Yet, it breaks all the time because it can't get licenses on the cloud. I am still not sure how MS isn't evading the requirements, but well, it's not my job to check it.
Even if you turn off auto-updates, some things still auto update silently. A long time ago, I wrote a small utility which listened to the PACKAGE_ADDED and PACKAGE_REMOVED events (I don't know if it's still possible to listen to these events on recent Android versions). IIRC, there were two packages that always updated silently (wihout a notification icon) and automatically, even with automatic updates disabled: com.android.vending (Android Market/Google Play Store), and com.google.android.gms (Google Play Services).
And I have had the pleasure of breaking a phone, being stuck with an old one for a few months, and said old phone slowing down to a crawl, as well as losing it's very limited storage space (a few hundred MB) for no other reason than the Google Play Store insisting on being the most recent version.
Is that a problem? I mean you're using a Google OS. At this point they are selling you a service, not a program. I have no idea what is in one version vs another, and I don't really care as long as the service keeps working.
Now, I do still care of being in control of my own hardware, but I do so on my server. I don't know of a cell phone that delivers what I want without being sold as a service rather than a standalone product. Best I can do is back up all my data to my own box and keep buying new phones when the batteries die.
This was a major major major problem for me. Those silent Android updates are buggy in huge ways. One of them turned off the barometer until phone restart, throwing my startup into a panic as our core product (live barometer data from millions of contributing phones) went slowly dark for some mysterious unknown and scary reason. The data took weeks to return and that gap is lost forever.
We used to, the company is no longer active. It was really neat data. It was open source code, but it's now a few years out of date, and would maybe be a good idea to rewrite, modernize and bring a big barometer network back online.
On the individual scale, the sensor data was noisy, but in a dense environment with lots of sensors, the noise is identifiable and filterable to get solid pressure trends (actual pressure values is considerably harder).
Yes, it is a problem: no updates means NO UPDATES, it does not mean all updates except for those that ignore the setting. The OS is supposed to enforce such things.
Exactly. People are forgetting the word "command". In the old days, users would command computers to do things, and the computers did those things. If I say rm -rf documents, I expect the documents directory to be removed. I'm not suggesting that the computer could do it, or asking the computer to do it. I'm issuing a command. And I expect it to be carried out completely. Delete it all. I don't expect the OS to keep around some dot-files that it really really likes, or to hit me up for confirmation, or to silently ignore me because the OS vendor can make more money by doing so.
It's a huge problem if I tell a computer to do something and it doesn't do it, it does it half way, or it usually does it but sometimes doesn't. We engineers need to have a Hippocratic Oath that starts with: 1. Never put the company's need over the user's intent.
Don't forget to mention that the term "user agent" for HTTP clients like web browsers used to be taken literally. Now, the expectation usually is that the browser acts in the best interests of the server, not the user.
Maybe I'm just crabby but I even resent having to ask my computer via its software if it could please, pretty please, shut down. As if I need its permission. Back in the day, you threw the power switch and it was off.
And, yes, I understand disk caches and why we have a graceful shutdown process. What irks me is that the computer might be in the middle of doing something despite my not having told it to be doing anything.
Anything a little larger (say a 4381) 'back in the day' also needed to be asked politely to be switched off, even PDP-11's running UNIX wouldn't take kindly to an unscheduled drop in input juice. fsck or the local equivalent would be your lot. I'm actually quite happy with the shutdown speed of modern hardware running Linux, it's typically under a second or so but I can see how it might get to you that you can't just throw the switch. It might be interesting to do this on purpose a bunch of times to see what the end result is, I built a car computer once that was arranged purposefully so that losing power at any time did not make it lose stuff but that was quite a tricky setup with a supercap and a bunch of 'early warning' logic to let the computer know that powerdown was imminent. It did work but I was never quite sure how much leeway there was.
To be entirely fair, the option (at least on my Play store) gives options of "Do not auto-update apps. // Auto-update apps at any time. Data charges may apply. // Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi only."
It could easily and even possibly be fairly argued that there's a massive difference between updating 3rd party apps and updating the operating system itself.
The Play services were originally an immutable part of the core OS, but it meant that security updates relied on the manufacturer to push updates, which were useless useless at doing.
I am minded that everyone would laugh at me if I took an un-patched Windows XP system on the internet, yet using ancient Android 4 is still common place. A PC can function offline where as most people can't isolate a phone (from multiple networks) without loosing the core functionality. The PC can be blank; phones usually contain all sorts of personal and private information.
Personally I want OS's to leave me the hell alone, but actually, I can't really blame them for trying to protect their users.
> It could easily and even possibly be fairly argued that there's a massive difference between updating 3rd party apps and updating the operating system itself.
Updates to the OS come as OTA notifications that I can choose how and when to apply (download+install separately, for example). I don't monitor my Play Services version, but I assume that it's silently updating in the background, unlike either my apps or the OS itself.
Google Play Services meets all the definitions of malware. The fact that it is built to spy on you and transmit personal information about you to a third party, can't be removed, and does things like update itself despite your explicit instruction for it not to.
It’s not the fault of “apps” here. The thing that is breaking compatibility is the server backend. Native frontends (“apps”) have to be coded defensively (e.g. to not even attempt to work unless you update) only because whatever backend service they talk to has no wire protocol that can go a month without what would be, under semver, a major release.
You’ll notice that apps that target stable protocols—POP3/IMAP mail clients, RSS newsreaders, vCard calendar apps—never force you to update. They don’t need to. The app will keep working as long as the server they are configured to talk to keeps speaking the same protocol (and it will, because public, RFCed protocols evolve really slowly.)
The fault here lies mostly, I think, with backend developers who have spent their entire careers working on web projects—where, if they want to make a breaking change, they can just ask the web frontend developers to make a matching change on the website that conforms it to the new wire-protocol, and at most the only problem users will have is that their webpage might spontaneously refresh itself if it was relying on a websocket connection. You can’t do that when you have a native frontend pointed at your backend service, but these backend engineers just don’t seem to put much weight on the needs of native frontends. It's web-frontend chauvinism, basically. (Either that or it’s their management forcing them to act as if they don’t.)
Nah, is not the devs, is the way the market works. If any of the major apps around will skip a release cycle, the entire media will be plastered with titles like "such and such are dying", investors will start panicking, users might start migrating, bad times for everyone. Basically, we, as a society, are using the wrong metrics to asses the health of an app/company.
I've uninstalled around 10 free to play games and apps that Windows 10 installed without asking in the past 6 months, so I'm not sure those slashdot people should be using windows as a good example of having control either despite that 30 years of backward compatibility. :)
Technically they're not installed, those are just shortcuts to install them.
The issue isn't really one of backward compatibility but software design and function. As far as I know, Android maintains API compatibility all the way back to API v1. A simple app, like the calculator, written in API v1 should run on the latest Oreo device.
An app requires a remote service to function must maintain compatibility with that service to function. The trouble is compatibility updates and feature updates aren't delivered separately. So you can't avoid new features if a service compatibility prevents your old version of the app from functioning.
Your complaint doesn't make much sense. These apps are pretty front ends for cloud databases, just like websites. You don't demand that websites serve you one version of javascript and then never update it again. These are not standalone local apps. They are client-server networked apps that need the client and server to stay in sync for them to work. Uber and Apple/Google have solved the problem you experienced by having the apps only be auto-updated while they're being charged so they don't chew up your battery. You decided to break that feature and then complain that your magical cab hailing device was slightly inconvenient.
> I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived.
I've had my phone die well before the Uber arrived and it wasn't a problem, it showed up at the place I requested.
Once the ride is initiated the drivers phone becomes the primary client. It seems quite flexible with devices going offline (as it should, mobile networks are unreliable).
> use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them for a month.
This is a worrying trend but I don't think it's really that bad yet. My primary phone died recently (famous Nexus 6p bootloop) and I used my old Samsung S3 with stock Android circa 2014 and I was surprised how many of the apps still functioned properly without updates (including the ancient built-in pre-Chrome webview Browser app).
... basically my expectation these days was that they wouldn't work. But in practice 99% of my phone use is SMS/Messengers + Maps + Browsers, and they all worked perfectly fine, web standards don't advance that quickly at all, and the messengers are all using simple protocols where they had no problem.
So it's typically the edge case 1-5% 3rd-party apps like Uber that are of concern.
It's really not hard to develop APIs that are versioned. This is becoming a standard best practice among mobile/web app developers (via SemVer standard). And there's no excuse for a big company like Uber to not support ~1-2yr old apps.
Everything you said about it being dead before the car arrived is true. However, it was not the point. What if the phone died before it could update? What if the driver couldn't see me so they had to call me, or I forgot the license plate? What if I was roaming on expensive data? What if that was a more critical app?
All of those things shouldn't be a problem in the first place.
As I said I believe apps should be supported for at least 1-3yrs at a minimum via versioned APIs and careful product planning. Especially for 'critical' apps and massively popular apps like Uber.
But otherwise it's not a massive problem, yet. But one we in the software community should promote as best practice and provide social pressure/ridicule when not done.
I'm not sure how I feel about this; you had the power to not auto update; you exercised it; the company had the power to not allow out of date apps use the service; they exercised it... seems right to me. You put yourself in that situation.
Replace "car-hailing app" with "phone that makes calls", "desktop operating system", "game", "TV that decodes images from airwaves", "car", "firmware to read expiration dates in juicero machine", "running shoes", "watch", "water kettle", "firmware that predicts upcoming heart attacks in pacemaker", "app that displays a map".
When do you think it starts becoming ridiculous to demand the rights to not update to the user? Do you think that a juicer that stops working because its firmware hasn't been updated recently, and they just changed their expiration date API, is reasonable? After all, yeah, I'm using their health-friendly juicer as a service, just as I'm using a TV to decode the airwaves as a service.
When the primary purpose of the device/application/product requires a connection to the internet in order to fulfill its primary purpose.
If it can't do its job at all without an internet connection then denying functionality if you don't update is entirely reasonable in my book. If it can do its primary job without an internet connection then no it's not.
That two can be decoupled. As the Google Maps example illustrated, there are ways/reasons that the app isn't updated, yet it still has an internet connection. The iPhone 4 is stopped at iOS 7, and most apps nowadays require iOS 9.
I think an one-month-old app that refuses to work is a bit too much.
I'll be honest, I don't. A lot of apps fall into the category of "Glorified website with better performance because it's native", I don't have a problem with a website downloading a new version of itself every time I open it, same with apps frequently updating. It seems like a complete non issue to me.
They are a, for profit, every website/app has a tech debt it's inevitable and you are asking them to keep an old API that will cost them more money to maintain as they will have to be careful while updating the database not to break the old API.
You didn't update your apps for a month, it shouldn't be that big of a deal but security fixes, bugs, and new features are several reasons why they need you to keep it up to date.
For example they introduced a new feature allowing drivers to see you on the map so they can find you more easily (you can disable it) most user will add extra pressure on the support by contacting them telling them they don't have that feature while it's 100% their fault for not updating, now if they force updates that's will reduce their costs.
Your view of it is simplistic and you only see your own benefit and not the full picture.
Yes the things you use everyday could stay the same for you and just work but that won't bring any income to the companies, if you buy a juicer that needs to be connected to the internet to work that's your own stupid decision.
This is a recurring theme here where people over-engineer their devices, workflows, and lifestyle. Then they get burned by it and blame everything except that over-engineering.
It's more an issue of producers trying to control User Experience right down to the nitty gritty of what stays up-to-date on a device they've already purchased and are trying to use/integrate into their already running lives.
Your device, workflow, and lifestyle are generally pretty integral to your devices, work, and life, so it's natural to want to exercise control over them?
yeah, how dare people expect their devices to work consistently! /sarcasm
I'd argue that the real problem is that software is eating the world, and companies are becoming less relevant to everyday life, but trying to force ways to stay relevant.
I have a very cheap phone which does not have a lot of space left for apps. So it became a habit for me to deinstall and install less frequently used apps only when I need them (e.g. I go on a trip). Actually it makes me feel better that apps like UBER are not installed when living mostly in a country where I cannot use them at all. Fun fact: You can use the same approach also on high end phones. Install less used apps only when you know you will need them. This way you also do not need to auto update less frequently used apps.
As an end-user, I'd like things the way they are. If I'm used to the app and it works, why should I be forced to update the damn thing so that it keeps working?
> Yeah, keep talking about Windows, until you fucking use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them for a month.
It's not really Windows' fault that the applications are being bad actors, though, so I don't see how that suddenly invalidates the backwards compatibility of the OS. Also, I'm sure if you use a 30-year old app, it's not going to prompt you to update before using it.
I remember being quite upset when Uber told me I had to update the app in order to use it. In recent years (at least on iOS), they now warn you that your version won't work in the near future. I suppose that if you don't use the app for a very long time, you might miss this warning window, but with my infrequent Ubering that hasn't happened yet.
You didn't mention the phone OS, but ... It's been a while since I was a 3rd party iOS developer, but I thought at one time having a "time bomb" or anything else that causes the app to basically do nothing is in violation of Apple's AppStore rules and would cause the app to get removed from the store.
It was Android. I don't exactly remember the message, but it was a forced update message from the app. Maybe it didn't tell me that I haven't updated the app in a month, but it refused to let me do anything without updating.
This is why I think it possible that we may yet have a text centric app to rule them all, as has China gravitated to WeChat.
Last night I was in a discussion about the whole shift in market power that a central role playing app like WeChat could enable: the premise of debate was that Alexa and competitors are potentially a step towards a new interest in text interfaces. Only our own generation has had our vision occluded by growing up in the command line interface, which is too involving and too complicated for widespread use. The word involving, we chose to describe the experience of working with a CLI, which, having stripped away every attribute we could, we concluded that you had to be involved in a continuous thought process to gain any utility from a CLI. Whereas we figured casual users wish to receive answers to questions, or refine queries without any parsing or precise expressions. So if we had a text interface that was more, so to speak, open ended, then also voice might be workable, and the interface become a widely used interaction. This then could really create the foundation for individual customisation, as local processing power can be applied to learning from the user's total interaction with many different types of connected application, as well as from existing phone voice command systems. We imagined further, that the opportunity might exist for a newcomer to enter this space, as the need for a independent and unaffiliated party for brokering online interaction is potentially a strongly perceived need, whilst we figured it remains one that is subject to the same negative perception of big internet names in a era when I more than my colleagues think that saturation reporting of privacies dying by the thousand cuts has engendered public apathy. We all agreed that public apathy or cynicism, even straight up hostility towards any attempt at selling a "do no evil" message, is a significant hurdle. The question we retired to consider, is how you can organically grow the required trust, in a market where giant capital can leave you alone with outmoded paradigms and entirely whole technologies behind the willing big spenders. As we have seen, there's no marketing to generational segments, when it comes to a web where the generations would not willingly be separated by communications islands - at least presently you couldn't sell a safebook social network to seniors and expect them to get their grandchildren on the platform.
Once gone our ways to home, a few hopeful texts were thrown around, wondering if there was some way to get sufficient a body of technology figureheads to be part of a board approving technologies for some kind of do no harm branding evaluation. This died the moment one of our more cynical lot linked a sheet of the quick results of his rough and ready search for directorships held by the first ten names we'd bandied about. He signed off, "you already know each advertising budget for those."
You can say the same thing with people being pissed off about forced Windows updates that got in their way: They could go make a coffee. I might have made it more dramatic than it really was, but forced updates do make people upset.
At least I don't have that problem with my Linux computer and I love it. It works exactly when I expect it to, and it updates exactly when I expect it to.
The problem isn't really manual control over updates here, so much as control over software. Many Linux systems are set to upgrade automatically, which is great for keeping secure from known vulnerabilities. Apps which aren't updated can still change in behaviour, such as Uber's update timebomb, contain hidden nasties, and the backends they use can change any time. Yet in the open source ecosystem someone can just fork your project if you take away features, or try to act against your users, as sometimes does happen.
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.
Auto Updates without user interaction is the biggest
security benefit I can think of for a normal user.
Auto updates are a great security benefit, yes.
So it's a shame so many companies shit all over auto updates by rolling out poorly tested changes that introduce new problems, and similar behaviour that motivates users to disable auto updates.
Microsoft also shits all over auto-updates by grinding underpowered computers to a halt and making powerful computers sound like hair driers while their auto-update runs ngen, grinds out msi executions, consumes disk space that isn't later cleaned up regardless of how much space is available, and generally acts like an ill-behaved uninvited guest.
Which would mean exponentially growing testing requirements on the part of the company delivering the updates.
"Should" in an ideal world doesn't equal "should" in a world with deadlines and limited resources. It's enough work to ensure that all the features work with ONE version of an app. If you had to also test every version of the app without this or that feature update installed, you just continually multiply the testing requirements by the number of optional features.
And don't say unit testing solves this problem. The problem is in INTEGRATION testing with the whole app, which 99% of the time can only adequately be done by making the build and having a human use it. Even automated integration tools won't find things like formatting errors and buttons too small for humans to click.
I'd like to continue to maintain ONE app, please, and not `n!` app permutations.
Your premise seems to ignore that maintaining several versions, even with numerous highly dependent variations, is something that was the norm in the software industry until relatively recently. Microsoft famously managed it with Windows for a long time until they lost the plot. I've run Debian systems for many years and never had unattended-updates break a box.
The trouble with today's highly connected world is that it has bred a culture of shipping software that isn't really production quality, on the basis that it can be fixed (or not) later and that's sufficient. This leads to arguments like your final paragraph: you (the developer) would obviously prefer to only maintain the latest and greatest of what you do, but stated without taking into account the consequences of that policy for your users/customers.
While I have a lot of sympathy for your desire, as a developer myself, I think you can only justify that sort of position if your previous releases are sufficiently good that they don't need maintenance. Otherwise, if you have customers paying for one thing, and that thing is defective, and you then want to use those defects as leverage to push your customers to something that is not what they paid for, then I think you're on very shaky ground. There are a lot of ethical, economic and legal issues raised by that sort of business strategy.
To be fair, Microsoft is still doing it (maintaining several revisions through security and bug fixes) with Windows 10 and Server 2016 and priors, it's just not visible to customers outside enterprise. The change is the expectation for your typical consumer or small business user, who are now used to everything updating and obsolescing periodically.
I don't like this attitude either, though. Developers have gotten fat and lazy not dealing with any sort of variation in deployment, let alone versions.
Everything is all Android or iOS. All Chrome and maybe Firefox. x86 or ... maybe arm. And not be connected to the Internet? That's unpossible!
With hindsight and better tooling we should be able to handle more complexity in how products are used, not less.
The problem is that security updates are bundled with feature updates, radical UI changes, and bleeding-edge bugginess. Nobody is arguing that the security benefit isn't there.
Automatically installed Windows patches are fantastic. I hardly even notice them. Sometimes a patch will cause an issue with some software but that's an acceptable trade off.
But then I get Candy Crush, or have to go through the setup again, or have all my display setting reset, get new "notifications", etc. These are not part of those security updates.
I agree that there are certainly benefits to auto-updates, but where I tend to dislike them (especially on the phone), is where I have infrequently used apps.
To stick with the Uber example, I don't live in a city with Uber, but have it on my phone for when I am. Why do I need to be burdened with using my data to constantly update an app I use once a year. This applies to a lot of apps (airlines, games, etc.). Games are really the worst offender as they tend to be quite large. Where release notes are provided in the app store, I will update if it is related to a critical security vulnerability, or something legitimate, but find it hard to rationalize constantly downloading 100+MB apps doing this for minor bug fixes that impact 0.001% of an apps user base.
I do only do updates on wifi, however, internet is both expensive and data caps are quite low where I live. I'd rather watch one more Netflix show than download an app I don't often use four times a month.
I agree with the comment below about this being an argument for delta updates.
The whole car metaphor is a bit unfortunate. Most people who want to drive securely from A to B would be pretty freaked out by a bunch of strangers quietly upgrading their car's brakes in the middle of the night. And they would definitely be pissed off if their car suddenly refused to accelerate beyond 25 mph on a clear, straight, empty stretch of dry road in broad daylight just because the speed limit happens to be 25 mph there.
It's a matter of perception and ignorance. We've been trained, for lack of a better word, to perceive the execution of software on the hardware we own as something completely orthogonal to our ownership of that hardware.
This argument can be also made positive. Imagine a new update (to be on your example, the new brakes) made the car safer and the saved your life because an accident could be avoided entirely. Otherwise you would be dead. It's not only negative...
Btw. when thinking of Tesla cars.. they auto update their software remotely ;)
You are not alone. I drive a car that is relatively old now, but well maintained and in good working order. I have no interest in buying anything in the current generation of half-baked "connected cars", where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible, but assumptions from another time underlie the architecture and security is bolted on as an afterthought if you're lucky.
It's not as if the danger here is hypothetical. Leaving aside the immaturity of technologies like autonomous vehicles, I've seen way too many cars being compromised in more mundane ways, from theft because the remote unlocking mechanism was laughably easy to crack, right up to literally stranding a vehicle in the middle of a high speed road using a laptop that is somewhere else entirely. The consequences the first time someone compromises one of these remote systems and decides that every <some popular model> in the city should turn hard left or accelerate to 100mph or slam on the brakes are horrifying.
Get back to me when we have the same level of scrutiny of these modern vehicles as we see in air travel, and when not getting security right poses an existential threat to the manufacturer's business, and then we can talk...
> where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible
This reminds me of the first Jurassic Park movie, where IIRC everything was controlled by a single mainframe, from the PABX to the electric fences of the dinosaur pens, and a disgruntled programmer pretending to fix the former disabled the later. We seem to be steadily moving towards that kind of world.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there are no positive consequences of automatic updates. Rather, I was trying to point out the difference in perception of ownership between things like cars and our hardware. Regardless of benefits and drawbacks of automatic updates themselves, I regard that difference in perception as dangerous and damaging.
To illustrate my point in terms of your analogy, if people could get free upgrades for their brakes that make the car safer, I like to think that they would still prefer to be given control over it, because they see it as "my car" and not "my car, but with brakes licensed from someone else". And I also like to think that they would object to arbitrary changes to the insides of their car with vague explanations of how the new insides are better.
Yes, but let's be clear about "without user interaction". That had better include "without user disruption".
Windows 10 is one of the worst abusers here: Updates are forced, and during updates, the computer is suddenly unusable. That is not okay.
Debian (derivatives, similar distros, etc.) has done it right for decades. Updates never block the user. Updates are consolidated, since every piece of software is a tracked package.
The reason your parents don't want to update Java is because they remember how much of a pain it was 10 years ago, and it doesn't really feel different.
Perhaps not intentionally but I always have "sudo pkill unattended-upgrades" close to hand when it pegs all my CPU cores whilst I'm trying to get something done.
I think that actually adds more weight to the point. Even upgrades with the best of intentions can go wrong, and users should have the power to stop them when they do.
To continue the article's analogy: One night I scared off all of the workers with a stick and changed the locks on the car so they couldn't get back in. That worked great for the first several weeks, until one morning I woke up to find the car on blocks with its wheels, engine, and doors gone and an obscene message spray-painted on the windshield.
that's the fallacy of people shipping bogus crap and you thinking you are at fault. Thanks google, i guess.
Most new features on chrome are not for your security. They disable all referrer control options. Want to only send referrer to the domain you are at now? though lucky, google makes money on cross-domain referrer reporting so they can track conversion from their ads.
That makes me think of xkcd 463: auto updates might be better than the alternative, but we shouldn't be needing a constant stream of updates in the first place.
Now you know why Google is so interested in self-driving cars. Driving time is one of the few untapped reservoirs of attention remaining. If the car can do the driving for you, your eyeballs are now free to have ads blasted into them.
When your car is fully self-driving, I'm sure you will be able to get a discount on the sticker/rental price by agreeing to view some ads on the in-car screens while you ride.
yeah, but then it starts loudly reading to you....and then at the end of the ride when you want to pay with your credit card the whole interface is weird. Better to just get really good at hitting the off button as soon as it allows you to.
I thought it was a story about cars and tech when I first started reading it. It wasn't until the article talks about dents and such that I realized this wasn't the focus.
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.
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.
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.
You can go Google-less on such devices if you want.
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.
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.
We are finally facing the ramifications of short-sighted decisions years ago. In the race to the bottom where a plurality of people opted for "free" or "cheaper" options, not enough people cared about how money is made. Companies like google aren't charities, so profits would have to be extracted irrespective of the dubiousness of the approach. The current situation was predicted by many.
corporations actually have most of the attributes people fear from AI (lack of concern about human values, optimizing for the values they care about at any cost, paperclip maximizer style, a vast amount of paralell and subversive power), its just that they are slow and inefficent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale?
> But why should in 2018 be so hard for one to be able to simply pay once for hardware or software, that puts the user first? Is it impossible for such a company to succeed at scale?
Apple seems to follow that plan. For your "email/chat/spreadsheets/storage", they have iCloud mail, iMessage, Numbers and iCloud Drive. You pay once, and get software support quite a lot of years later. They don't seem to be selling or gathering much data. They won't show you ads.
Now, it won't be RMS approved, but that's another debate.
Just like you use software by license and don't "own" it, hardware makers have realized they can bilk with the same business model. It's no coincidence that slime software companies are the ones making the current hardwares that have such "features" -- Apple and Google chiefly among them, along with the ecosystem they created in their own image.
I heard Stallman talk at graduate school in the early part of this century.
I though he was a bit extreme at the time, but over time I've come to appreciate his position. Having software be open and modifiable is really quite an amazing thing. those open building blocks lets us do amazing things with software quite easily.
Its time for an open source desktop os and software to go mainstream. We realize that apple is not reliable making developer grade notebooks and their unix underpinnings show that it is possible. Then onto phones. I feel open source software will keep the hardware from being too weird
For those who care about having OSS powered desktop/laptop, I think the situation isn't as bad as it's sometimes made out to be. Both Debian and Arch have worked very well for me, and been my primary OS for years.
It is frustrating that we still can't really get full control of the hardware, but at least from the kernel on up we can have pretty complete control of software.
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
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.
I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
For the majority of the history of land lines and analog phones, the phones and lines were owned by the telephone company, and leased by the consumer. This change happened in 1982, 10 years AFTER mobile phones were invented.
It is a bit disingenuous to say that 1982 was ten years after mobile phones were invented. Technically true, but mobile phones as we know them were not really a thing until mid to late nineties.
Not sure this really changes your point, of course. :) It is funny to see the surprise in people when they hear that you used to lease the phone in your house. Especially if you are like me and detest cable companies for wanting me to do the same with their crap.
> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?
Many (HTC, Google, ASUS, etc. - NOT Samsung) unlocked android phone can be loaded with a variety of bootloaders and then flashed with the ROM of your choice where you have full root access. Of course without google apps (Google Play Store) your phone isn't all that useful, but you can install google apps ( maybe from a questionable legal/copyright stand point, I don't remember) and have more control over the device.
Not sure if this matches what you mean by fully owned though. Checkout XDA Forums (https://forum.xda-developers.com/) to see what interesting things are out there you can do. There's also LineageOS (https://www.lineageos.org/) formerly CyanogenMod.
Yes, but by unlocking you lose every bit of physical security that device had. Anybody having physical access to your phone can then dump the phone's content to a usb drive in kinutes and without any other tool than a otg cable.
The makers of the alternative recovery don't bother (who can blame them, they are volunteers) and the manufacurers don't care to implement a proper bootloader that would support reliable re-locking after installing a modified recovery.
Besides that, all this alternative software is distributed binary on shady sharehosters by more or less random people on forums. Not exactly a good basis if you wanted to re-gain trust in your phone.
I suggest to everyone I know to try going a couple of weeks without a smart phone. You can still stay in touch over calls/sms, but is much easier to distinguish useful screentime, as in the time I'm working on a computer versus fluff screentime when I'm feeling awkward or mindlessly scroll feeds. It helped a lot with being present, not being bombarded with notifications and actually valuing communication.
I've seriously contemplated a roll-your-own "dumb phone" solution not only for myself but also for my mother and in-laws (they're all in their 70s). An Adafruit Fona would provide all of the telephonic functionality I'd care about, and then it's just a matter of choice regarding microcontroller, display, etc.
At that point you're trusting the chipmakers to not have anything funny in there, and trusting the telco to not be doing anything funny with your location or voice information.
> Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user?
Funny you bring up land lines, considering that those essentially began the trend of operator-owned end-user equipment. See for example Model 500 phone:
> As with most telephones of the time in the United States, the 500-series telephones were owned by the local Bell Operating Company and leased on a monthly basis to customers
I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones.
It's a relative scale. A binary blob isn't ideal from a security and privacy perspective, though given the nature of radio transmissions used with these devices, there are legitimate arguments in its favour as well. In any case, you're still much better off with a device where that is the only unknown factor than you are with a device where apps routinely spy on you and phone home etc.
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.
As someone also still rocking the original MBPr, the peak for it software wise is actually El Capitan
I really, really wish i had never updated from that. It was faster, smoother, and more stable there than it was before and after. Definitely way better than Mavericks. I push this thing hard with premiere/ableton live/etc too.
My main problem with El Cap is that iPhoto won't work any more. I have a huge investment in iPhoto -- tons of curated albums with no way to import them to Photos (what were they thinking?), and no obvious alternative.
Also, I absolutely despise the El Cap design. The flat look control widgets and icons, the barely visible grey text, the secret hidden controls that only appear when you mouse over them, it all makes me cringe. (Yes, Mav has a few hidden controls as well, but at least now I know where they all are. If I upgrade, I have to go on the secret control easter egg hunt all over again. Life is too short for that kind of bullshit.)
Aren't you afraid of being hacked? In my case, since I use the phone for 2FA access to bank accounts, I bite the bullet and keep up with the phone upgrade threadmill solely for security purposes.
Also these updates drain the battery all the time and there is no way to tell them to please stop.
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.
My android phone was configured out-of-the-box to only run autoupdates when plugged in and on wifi. It's easy to see because if I haven't plugged my phone in for a few days, as soon as I do it starts updating like crazy.
I do this too, and the most annoying thing is just to arrive home at the end of the day and my phone becoming unusable because something, somewhere has to update ASAP on WiFi. I don't even keep that many apps installed, but as sure as eggs, something always needs an update.
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.
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.
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
Already happening. But everyone called RMS a kook. He looks funny. He talks funny. He's a socialist. He smells. And here we are. People are praising Apple--Apple--for letting people pay money for closed software that, at the very least, lives on their own device.
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything.
It sure makes law enforcement's job easier if more peoples' entire phones are subject to the Third Party Doctrine, rather than just what passes over the wire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Windows 10 Pro, you can with Group Policy. My machines are set to "Notify to install" - it's not ideal, as Windows Defender updates use the same path so it's triggered at least once a day, but a small system tray notification of "You need some updates" is an improvement over the more forceful notifications and unexpected reboots.
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.
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.
Yeah, it seems like the name is a little misleading. The reason for "I've never felt less in control of my own hardware" is the software for the most part.
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.
That is a statement I would really love for you to investigate the validity of, because there is nothing in the real world that supports that as a universal claim. If an industry has an established pattern and the only people who want that pattern to change have no influence (for instance, "not buying a cell phone" is not an option, whether you live in the US or rural Vietnam) then it doesn't matter how many people "want" that change, they have no leverage to effect it.
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.
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.
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...
Do you disagree with the fact that it popped up without notice, or do you disagree with the fact that the person who wrote this article didn't like having it get installed without notice?
Because the most important part of this writeup is that it's almost devoid of judgement calls on whether what the updates do are actually good or bad, it's about the lack of control and the lack of any ability to beforehand tell whether it's going to be good or bad.
If you love pocket, rock on, but maybe you would have also discovered that if you had been suggested to opt in to it for a few days, to see if you'd like it, rather than it suddenly being not just on your computer, but fully and irrevocably integrated into your web browser. And that maybe is literally that: maybe. We'll never know, because you were never given that option.
My perception is probably warped by the fact that I used pocket before I moved to firefox. So after I downloaded firefox after years on chrome, it was a very pleasant surprise to see pocket already there. And to me it was an added value.
But that makes me wonder, is this just an age old gripe with change in general or does this actually add anything new to the conversation. Will we get articles in the next 10 years about how pocket was better and they don't feel in control of their computers because firefox moved to a new system and changed a menu entry?
I turned off auto-updates on my phone.
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.
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.