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Well for one, Mailpile is a local client. Mailvelope can be updated/accessed by the developer at any time.

"local client" and "updated/accessed by the developer at any time" are not mutually exclusive: the most common example is Chrome, and AFAIK applications on Android can be updated at the developer's will (I'd guess it's the same for iOs and WP, too).

The model we have for traditional PCs is actually a remnant of the disconnected era in which applications were first conceived: manual update when the user knows they have a connection.

For iOS and Android at least, automatic and relatively transparent updates are a user-preference, so you can't as a developer force users to update, although I'm sure most have automatic updates enabled. You could I suppose version your API calls and disable all but the newest version from working, provided you have a server component, but that's about it I think.

On Android it's off by default, and you can easily enable/disable it. On Chrome it's on by default, and I don't even know how to disable that (I assume it's somewhere in flags, which is of course terrible UX for something like this)

Not if you build the extension yourself; but then you don't have the updates.

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