That's not to say app developers can't silently update, but using CodePush doesn't lock your app into that workflow.

(full disclosure: I'm doing other things now, but I worked on this project for a few months)

As was mentioned, our existing API surface actually leans towards the use of "active updates" that present the option to install or ignore to the end-user. That said, I think there are numerous scenarios where silent installs could be valuable as well, and you could even imagine an app having a user option to disable that or not.

We want to provide the primitives and services necessary to create these experiences, without imposing any specific opinion to how devs should cater to their respective userbase. Compelling user experiences are absolutely priority one!

Only for a very tiny niche group of users. I'm part of that niche as well - but I recognize that most users love auto-updating things. They don't have to worry about updating, new features get pushed to them, etc. It's a great user experience for most people.

Only a small number of power users ever touch the settings/option menu of the software they use and fewer would ever see a reason to "downgrade" to a previous version - let alone know how to go about doing so.

So, I'm not sure it is really great experience for most people. Given that generally there is no way to roll back, I suppose most just learned to live with such things, whenever it's great for them or not so much.

I may have a wrong idea, but I perceive it as a culture where user is nearly powerless against the almighty Developers' will. I still haven't gave up on my own preferences, yet. Fear that future will break me, though.

The issue is not silent updates (an option to have unattended upgrades in some places are godsend!), but in not generally having an option to prevent those and not having a way to roll unwanted ones back.

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An easy way would be to use telemetry to measure how many of your users change default settings. ;)

I only have this from 4 years ago [0]. But is also something I've observed.

> I think over the years I saw a lot of outcries when there were visible changes in various applications.

Visual changes are typically seen as unwarranted. It's a huge risk with minor gains (UX of new users) by alienating old users and hoping 'they'll adapt'. But to touch on this a bit...

Unhappy people are also the loudest. If a platform has 1,000,000 viewers and 1% change their settings and you screw with those settings - you're going to have 10,000 people who are pissed off and venting. Which can seem massive - and out of the 990,000 others maybe 2 or 3 might voice their approvals/thanks for the update?

This is why many game studios ignore their forums. Forums are typically only a minority of the overall fan base, even if they're typically the most outspoken/loyal fans.

[0] https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-t...

I got a Windows 10 laptop recently and took a look around the OS. Relevant to the discussion, one thing was just brilliant - user satisfaction feedback buttons (the smiley/frowny faces in some apps). Hope such things help debiasing feedback.

For many apps that communicate with a remote service, you're gonna have to eat _some_ update somewhere down the line.

Seriously, how is this the top voted comment???

It may work great for you. For a lot of us, it's tiring. It's not as if all these updates end up being bug-free.

The real solution is to do incremental changes in most cases. Though this is a bit troublesome for the whole "I control the code on my machine" thing. In which case you could rip out the updater

Anecdotally, my dad, which happened to run Chrome on Windows, didn't fancy most of visible changes.

You'd expect the latter to change whenever they update the server—so why not the former?

As for notifications - I'm not bothered by those. I think I get only a few every other week. Guess it's because I don't have many apps and the ones I have don't update every other day. Also, I allow some apps - those whose developers I trust, those that can't get worse and those I either don't care much about - to auto-update. But I manually track the updates for the apps I use daily. Don't want to find that things I'm used to are suddenly broken.

If there'd be a way to hook into Play Store to trigger a full backup before the upgrades, I suppose I would've enabled auto-updates for most apps.

its not nice for users but they dont give a crap

what would be okay i guess is if you could choose the branch and commits you're running yourself, so power users have choices, others get whatever is latest and freshest and safe and whatever.