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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

I miss knowing that updates even happened. I also miss important features remaining stable.

Which is why, for the most part, I've stopped using web-based applications.

You want a chuckle, turn off automatic app updates on an Android phone and see how many prompts you get. And how terrible the patch notes are ("Fixed some things")

In fact, my Android 11 device has no browser enabled, the play store is disabled, and almost every app it came with is disabled. It functions solely for email, instant messaging, a TODO tracker, and taking photos.

Edit: not sure why this was downvoted. Did someone find the idea of a narrowly-focused phone to be offensive or unworthy of discussion?

We know but OP was telling you to experiment: turn off auto update and turn on the play store, and see how many prompts you get.

We're not sure why you went to describe how you read emails, and that's why we downvote you. Your answer was completely irrelevant !

There's almost nothing to auto-update on my device, aside from less than a couple of IM apps and an email app. Sharing that info was the point of my reply.

I have 25 applications on my android that never get updated. I don't use gmail, and I don't want it installed on my phone at all. (I have the mandatory account to activate the phone, but all my mail is via fastmail). I update the apps I use (or sometimes apps I think I should use but don't)

> (I have the mandatory account to activate the phone, but all my mail is via fastmail).

Interesting, I don't have a google account associated with my phone. It means the google app store doesn't work, but everything else works fine AFAIK. I use FDroid or just download apks directly.

Nowadays even on iPhone half the apps phone home to their server, determine they’re not running the latest version, and then refuse to let you use them until you update.

If the APIs backing the app have changed, then this is better than letting the user deal with the consequences of undefined behaviors.

I wonder if developers who do this simply don't want to publicly identify and take responsibility for bugs that they introduced earlier. It's easier to just say "bug fixes" then it is to say something like "I overlooked several surprisingly common edge cases in the parser module and have updated it to correctly handle several character sequences that were causing exceptions to be thrown." With automatic updates and vague update notes, anyone who did not directly experience the bug never has to know it existed in the first place and the developer never has to admit it existed in the first place.

In my experience, these notes aren’t written by devs in bigger companies.

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