I would prefer to know what the product will do when I purchase it, and it should continue to do the same things in the same way for its entire lifespan. I would also prefer that vendors be unable to retroactively add ads, tracking, or other user hostile "features".

Also, as an embedded engineer, I know things get tested better the more "final" they are. Faster release cadences always have poor testing as one of the tradeoffs.

> You act like there's no benefit to the user either, plenty of software gets better because of updates shipped after the fact.

There is a "release early, release often" line of thinking.

But I also think there is a risk of "fixing it in post(-production)" thinking: that lack of preparation and care can be patched over after-the-fact.

The averaged-over-usage-lifetime software quality for things like cars or video games is worse today than it was before OTA updates

Arguably the peak quality after a few months/years of fixes is better, but that doesn't really matter because usage is front-loaded

> plenty of software gets better because of updates

This was true for old Microsoft Windows releases. This is not true anymore. Everything is a rolling release. Angry users ? F*k them. They will get an update.

You act like all the updates benefit the user.

s/better/less bad/