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Comment by ayoisaiah | Hacker News Reader

Auto update is good default policy IMO. Most non-technical people don't care to update apps as long as the apps are working which could lead to unnecessary security issues or critical bugs left unpatched.

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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?

I got tired of certain apps that kept changing behavior or UI every single week. Some of them sneakily added antifeatures that were not there originally or move features to premium asking me to pay again.

In consequence I disabled auto updates and run an update when I remember...

I'd rather prefer to have auto updates for just security patches not for features.

This doesn't help much, since antifeatures are rarely described as such (or even at all) in release notes.

What would be more helpful would be the ability to revert to previous versions (can't speak to Android, but this is certainly missing in iOS).

Android can sort-of do it. It's often possible to downgrade without losing data if the application signature hasn't been tampered with.

It's funny because as you mention this, somebody made a thread few days ago for iOS already

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175955 | An iOS app update that annoys me | Hacker News

Applications should not have security issues or critical bugs to begin with.

Unfortunately, humans are not capable of errorless long-term work.

Lol wut? Thousands of brilliant programmers who work for top tech companies push bug fixes and android gets a security update every few months. We are people, people make mistakes, we're not some code fairy queen.

Automatic security updates, yes. Automatic feature updates, no.

That still gives power to the developer. O could add an anti-consumer change and call it a security feature, prompting devices to automatically update it.

Let's not act like Google would hand out any punishment, either.

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