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
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.
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