Unpopular opinion: User-facing Software Updates are Bad

3 points by seniortaco 229 days ago | 3 comments

Topic for discussion: User-facing Software Updates are a failure of modern software engineering.

Full disclosure, I've been in tech for 20 years, and I've pushed many software updates to many clients on many platforms. I'm definitely more part of the problem than the solution here. But I guess I just thought we would have fixed this by now. Am I the only one?

Case study 1: My house has 2 thermostats, one very old one for the furnace, and a new one for the AC unit upstairs. This is a strange situation, but it's an old house. The very old thermostat has an iOS and Android App that is so old it never receives updates anymore. It's worked flawlessly for 9 years. It always connects, and always look the same way I expect it to when I open it. It always works. The new thermostat has a newer App that receives software updates often, and often is broken by them or the UI changes. Recently, I had to climb up in my attic to reset the system after a software update so that the App could reconnect. After an update, I open the app and instead of being able to change the temperature I get permission pop-ups to re-enable notifications because the App updated, then I get a "What's New" popup about what has changed, and I have to skip through all this just to change the temperature. The software update provides nothing beneficial and only gets in the way of my operation of my A/C unit. Imagine if your front door needed to update before you could enter your house. Imagine if your microwave needed to update before you could start it.

Case study 2: Security updates. Generally I can't convince anyone that "Software updates are Bad" because that is tantamount to saying "Security is bad" which it is definitely not. My perspective is, if my software needs a security update, why do I need to be involved in this at all? Why can't my software be updated without my involvement? Without closing my 1000 browser tabs. Without requiring a system restart. Without forcing me to stop my work. As a software developer, I can definitely list out the technical reasons why we need to restart, but as a user I couldn't care less. Just make my software secure behind the scenes, don't involve me, and don't force me to stop using my device.

The technical challenge is definitely interesting here, but I'm more concerned with the fact that we've somehow convinced our users to accept mediocrity.

PaulHoule 229 days ago |

The idea where you can upgrade modules of a system without rebooting the whole thing is a big factor in mainframe operating systems.

The best idea from Windows Vista was organizing the whole display system around the paradigm that each application blasts out a rectangle of pixels to the compositor which in turn blasts out a rectangle of pixels to a service that writes them to the screen -- the userspace recruits the GPU to draw a rectangle of pixels.

The display system can be restarted without affecting the applications or the rest of the OS so you can upgrade your display drivers and the screen flashes and you go on your way. If the display system crashes... the screen flashes and you go on your way. Brilliant, I just wish it was all like that!

There are reasons why a software system can need to restart but properly modularized you can restart one subsystem at a time with little intrusion on the user experience.

seniortaco 228 days ago | |

That's fantastic. It used to be you had to restart the whole PC after a driver update.

If someone could do this for the Web Browser, I could see that potentially being a strong enough feature for users to switch from say Chrome to Firefox. "Never need to close your tabs with In Place Updates."

mouse_ 229 days ago |

It's not about software anymore, it's about leverage.