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?

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.

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)

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.