Why do computers force updates on you at certain points? Like “screw whatever you’re doing it’s update time!” Kind of thing.
In: Technology
The biggest reason is security. Security researchers (read: hackers) are constantly discovering new exploits which the developers must then patch. If given the option to, many users will just continue to postpone software updates indefinitely. This becomes a security risk for which the software developers are ultimately responsible, hence forced updates.
This often happens with computers managed as part of a corporate environment. I can tell you from experience with corporate IT systems that if they are given a choice to delay installing update, *most users will delay indefinitely*. This can prevent needed security updates from getting installed. And some times. you just need to say, as an IT administrator, that these updates are more important than the next ten minutes of your workday.
People don’t regularly update and restart their computer. They don’t just download and force you to restart right now.
Because many users do not make updates when they have the choice. You have seen this with Windows XP. I know of offices where the updates were disabled on all workstations.
“Computers” don’t force updates on you–*operating systems* and the companies that make them do. Inconveniently timed forced updates were the last straw that pushed me from Windows to Linux, and I’m glad I made the switch.
Because people used to put their updates off over and over and over again, and then complained when they got hit by an attack/malware that would have been solved by patching ahead of time. Also, it’s really only Windows that does that – almost every other OS gives you a choice.
A little piece of advice: Microsoft Updates come out on Tuesdays, except hotfixes for huge issues – save your work on Tuesday and leave your machine running overnight to download and install updates. You can also configure your “work hours” in the settings app, which will stop Windows from updating during your “working” time.
There’s never a good time to run updates because most people only really have their computer on when they’re using it and then turn it off or put it to sleep. Updates are important for security and stability fixes as well as providing new features, so in the end having everyone on the most recent version will cause less user headache with unfixable issues than the headache cause by the computer doing updates every now and then.
Because users are morons, and will defer updates indefinitely because it’s inconvenient, never quite processing that getting hacked is going to make a 30 minute update look like a day at the park.
As some one in the software dev field here are my reasons.
As a lot of people have mentioned security is a one. Having a user never update and then come crying and bitching to you when they get destroyed by a virus gets old very fast.
Along with security is bug fixes. While people don’t like the forced update they like random crashes even less. It’s important that your product feel high quality, i.e it dose not randomly crash or have other undesirable behavior. So we would rather you get that once a month inconvenience of a forced restart than the inconvenience of a crash. The first makes us look annoying the later makes us look incompetent. Also the first is just a fact of life now, the second is something that gets you taking on Reddit about how shit our product is.
We also want consistency, i.e we want all users to have the same experience. This can be important for a lot of reasons. The first is so everyone can use it. Lets say we are apple back in the day, and we just came out with faceTime. You love faceTime and want to use it with your apple friends. Well you are SOL they have never bothered to update so they can’t use faceTime. This is not a good experience and will make faceTime adoption hard, but if we force update then everyone will have faceTime because it and all the underlying code you need for it were in the last forced update.
This also helps us figure out what’s working and what’s not. Say the Foo function is not getting the user adoption we expected/wanted. Is that because the Foo function is bad, or is it that version 1.1.0 was bad? We fixed a lot of the issues in 1.2.0 but if you never updated you do get the fixes. So it is hard to tell if we have a issue in 1.2.0 or if it’s just all the people using 1.1.0 giving it a bad rap.
If you go back in time to the days of heavily pirated Windows XP, Microsoft did not allow pirated copies to get Windows updates. However, this meant that they got no security updates, so they were very vulnerable to any exploits people found. This meant that it became very easy to create a Bot-Net from them. Essentially, viruses that just recruit your computer to do mass work like DDoS attacks or such.
This is kind of bad press for Microsoft, especially since Mac had this reputation of not being prone to viruses (in reality, it just was a less opportunistic target, there was nothing that specifically made it virus proof).
Nowadays, it is considered better to give the user some amount of time to try and get them to go along with updates on their schedule, but eventually just force it on them. Too many people would avoid installing them, and they would have significant security risks associated.
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