Needy Software
But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.
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This got so bad that when a program doesn’t ask you to create an account, it feels refreshing.
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Everybody is checking for updates all the time. Some notoriously bad ones lock you out until you update.
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Notifications are like email: to-do items that are forced on you by another party. Hey, it’s not my job to dismiss your notifications!
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The company needs to announce a new feature and makes [an onboarding] popup window about it.
Adobe is so awful about this, it added an option called “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop “to reduce in-app pop-ups and non-essential notifications”. Not eliminate — that would be too kind — but reduce. And this preference is not in every Adobe app, so every time I update Illustrator or InDesign, I am treated like I have never used either one before. (Notably, I was not informed about this “Quiet Mode” preference with an in-app notification. I stumbled across it after desperately searching the web.)
When I read this yesterday, the Adobe icon in my menu bar had a red dot in it. I don’t really care to be notified in that way when a Lightroom update is available. But this red indicator was not even for an app update. It was to let me know that the “Day Two keynote” at the Adobe MAX conference was available to watch. Wouldn’t want to miss that!
So I agree with this sentiment, but I would like to present a steelmanned argument: a change introduced in an update may either benefit or confuse a user.
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Updates are now largely automatic or even, in the case of many software-as-a-service apps, mandatory. This means changes will be introduced without any warning.
I agree with Heer on this, but the app should put me in control. I should be able to skip the onboarding and get right back into the app with a single tap. There should also be a link or menu command so that I can go back and view the information when I feel like it.
Why are so many big developers shipping new versions every two weeks? What could possibly warrant that?
Jeff Johnson says it’s Agile. Yet I don’t think continuous integration means that you need to be constantly shipping. They are optimizing for how the developer wants to work, not what the customer wants delivered. This is the same issue that I have with Apple’s OS release schedule. The theory is that everything is always at a high level of quality so it’s fine to ship on a fixed schedule, creating a “continuous flow of value to users.” The reality is that there are no more polished releases. Any given release may fix a bug in one area but turn another area beta without warning.
I don’t think users are complaining about server code being updated too often. In fact, most users have no idea how often server-side code is updated. With automatic app updates, users may also have no idea how often their app is updated. Does it matter if the updates happen every other week or every other month?
An unfortunate pattern I’ve been seeing lately is that they make a breaking server code change and so you’re forced to update the client.
As a user, I prefer the old model where the updates are presented on a reasonable schedule in a way that makes sense to me. This is a feature update that’s well tested, this is a bug fix update, and I can see what’s happening (I love reading release notes) and when I want to update each app. But the App Store model has ruined this because developers are constantly pushing updates, and they happen in the background (sometimes breaking things at the worst time) without showing any release notes. There are so many updates that it’s impractical to turn off auto-updates, as I found when I did that for a year. You just end up with a huge backlog in the App Store app with little way to sort through them.
