Comment by Saaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Saaster | Hacker News Reader

I work in a tech company. The number of people you see who have their desktop filled with permanently mounted DMGs, launching their apps by opening said DMG and launching their trusty old Chrome version 53 by double-clicking the icon would blow your mind.

Users don't use your software as you would like them to. Zoom now requires ~4 clicks to update when a new version is released as you click through the installer steps. You have to click the single frickin' disk icon (which is the only disk 99.9% of Apple users are going to have... still you have click on it) in one of the steps for the Next button to activate. Result: I fully expect a large percentage of the users to never update their Zoom successfully again. Great win for the users, the software which you downloaded, then clicked to install, no longer executes that scary pre-install script.

Not sure about what clicking disk icon you are talking about, but today's update showed up as regular pkg installer ("Next", "Next", "Accept", "Finish").

Chrome uses an DMG, and the result is that people are using ancient versions of it straight out of their Downloads or Desktop folders.

Zoom uses an .pkg, and have now removed the one-click install script. So every update to Zoom now runs through the same multi-step Next process as well (with one of the steps inactive until you select your disk, as is customary). If you think that isn't a problem for users, you've never walked grandma through the steps while she's trying to show her screen though the phone to you.

I believe you that in some configurations you have to select a disk where you want update to be installed but in my case it's selected automatically so as I mentioned in the previous post, it's matter of clicking "Next" buttons.

I don't understand. How is difficulty completing the initial installer relevant to autoinstalling updates?

Zoom's updates also runs though the entire installer again as of today.

Why is this necessary, though? There are examples of other apps, not distributed on the Mac App Store, that don't require the whole pkg flow for every update. Steam and Skype are examples.

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