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Comment by spaqin | Hacker News Reader

I would also put into question if you _really_ need to check for updates every 5 minutes. Once per startup is already enough, and if you're concerned about users who leave it on for days, it could easily be daily or even less often.

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A 5 minute update check interval is usage-reporting in disguise. Way fewer people would turn off a setting labeled “check for updates” than one labeled “report usage statistics”.

Eh, this one is probably ignorance over malice. It's super common to see people who need to make an arbitrary interval choice go with 300 out of habit.

Do they say that they don't do any usage reporting?

from their FAQ on the buttom of the fronpage:

Screen Studio can collect basic usage data to help us improve the app, but you can opt out of it during the first launch. You can also opt out at any time in the app settings.

Don’t give them ideas!!

never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence

No. Eradicate this line of thinking from your brain. If the outcome is the same then the intent doesn't matter.

Yes and one provides cover for the other.

In fact, assume the opposite unless you have a reason to assume otherwise (aka a close personal relationship). Giving strangers/businesses that you have no connection to the benefit of the doubt when they harm you is a good way to get taken advantage of.

Never contort your reasoning to attribute to incompetence what is much better explained by malice. Especially when politics or money is involved, malice should be the assumed default.

or they can send report usage statistics without you knowing or being able to disable it.

It's absolutely way too frequent.

Their users do not care about their screen recording studio anywhere near as much as the devs who wrote it do.

Once a month is probably plenty.

Personally, I disable auto-update on everything wherever possible, because the likelihood of annoying changes is much greater than welcome changes for almost all software I use, in my experience.

To be as user friendly as possible, always ask if user wants automatic background updates or not. If you can’t update without user noticing it, please implement manual updates as two mechanisms:

1) Emergency update for remote exploit fixes only

2) Regular updates

The emergency update can show a popup, but only once. It should explain the security risk. But allow user to decline, as you should never interrupt work in progress. After decline leave an always visible small warning banner in the app until approved.

The regular update should never popup, only show a very mild update reminder that is NOT always visible, instead behind a menu that is frequently used. Do not show notification badges, they frustrate people with inbox type 0 condition.

This is the most user friendly way of suggesting manual updates.

You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.

> You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.

That's not an user issue tho, it's a "packaging and distribution of updates" issue which coincidentally has been solved for other OS:es using a package manager.

Getting used to changes is not something a package manager can help with.

Or a developer problem when they keep updating their apps every few days for no apparent reason..

I'd also question if the updater needs to download the update before the user saying they want it. Why not check against a simple endpoint if a newer version is available and if so, prompt the user that an update could be downloaded and then download it. This would also allow the user to delay the update if they are on metered connections.

notepad++ works this way

In the previous year 2023 discussion, the founder says that the update interval was changed to 3 hours. lol. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35873727

If the update interval had been 1 day+, they probably wouldn't have noticed after one month when they had a 5 minute update check interval.

First thing I thought as well. Every 5 minutes for a screen recording software is an absurd frequency. I doubt they release multiple new versions per day.

IIRC, Every 5 minutes used to be the standard interval between email checks, back in the days of dialup and desktop email clients.

How the times have changed ..

It's near-instant now not usually because of more incessant polling, but because it simply keeps the connection open (can last many hours without sending a single byte, depending also on the platform) and writes data onto it as needed (IMAP IDLE). This has gotten more efficient if anything

And because how expensive they were in Portugal, I never done it, it was always on manual.

Right!

The "send and receive" button is seared into my brain

I was in Spain at the time, and at first you had to connect to the Internet through a phone number in France.

Did you guys have something like that?

In the early days, it was a long distance call to either Lisbon or Porto, I only got a modem, when regional numbers were available to the district capitals.

However on BBS days was much worse, it was mostly long distace calls to someone around the country, and they usually only had a couple of connections available like five or so.

Ah another thing is that they adopted the same model as mobile phones, so at least we could pre-pay the calls, and went we run out of cash there was it, no surprise bills, even if frustated.

Check for updates every 5 minutes is a bug itself ;)

It is sort of fun (for $8,000) as it was “just” a screenshotter, but imagine this with bank app or any other heavily installed app.

All cloud providers should have alerts for excessive use of network by default. And they should ask developers if they really want to turn alerts off.

I remember Mapbox app that cost much more, just because provider did charge by months… and it was a great dispute who’s fault it was…

And if it is necessary, the proper way to do this is via DNS with a record with a TTL less than 5 minutes, not pinging some webserver.

This could have easily been avoided by prompting the user for an update, not silently downloading it in the background... over and over.

Depends on the application. I have my browser running for months at a time.

Yeah but that should be a variable anyways. Maybe even a variable provided by the server. But in this case it should be on demand. with the old version cached and only downloading the new one when there is a new version once a day.

Yeah but that should be a variable anyways. Maybe even a variable provided by the server.

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