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.
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I use no Adobe software (yay Acorn, Pixelmator, and Affinity) so I feel pretty immune from this except for Zoom.
Your link to what you did when you turned off auto-updates for a year is linked to the wrong thing. It’s linking to the “Official Overcast Reddit” page
Agree with these points. Largely fine with some notifications about updates, though really prefer some more fine-grained (or sane defaults for serious security updates) prefs for how often I am bothered. Do not want any marketing unless it's some kind of "hey, the next update is going to be a *paid* update."
I am a devoted Lightroom user, and pay for the Adobe Photography subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom. I rarely use Photoshop though, so I only launch the Creative Cloud nagware for updates a couple of times a year, otherwise leaving it dormant. I actually install Lightroom from the Mac App Store instead of Creative Cloud, which is the same software and just silently updates whenever it needs to and does not hassle me.
@Joe The link is correct. I talk about how I didn’t update Overcast for a year, which was only possible because I turned off auto-updates globally.
@thomasjpr I don’t intentionally launch Creative Cloud, but it seems to reassert itself in the menu bar after each update. This is the rare case where I would prefer to update through the Mac App Store, but Lightroom Classic isn’t available there.
Another type of neediness is the need to contact the outside world. It's rare that an app does not want to contact Crashlytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Fonts or whatnot. The most stupid apps are the ones where I got a white interface (as in no controls visible) when I used Little Snitch to block everything. At least I need to be warned as user: hey this is a webapp and not a real one.
This seems apt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBZv0_MImIY
Otherwise I agree with the observations on calling home, notifications and updates. Software should know its place - which is doing its job while causing as little friction to the user as possible.
Recently, Microsoft pushed three updates in as many days for their Windows App (aka RDP client) for one compatibility feature added - god forbid you test your software before releasing it and bother the user as little as possible.
