That is an amazing feature that benefits everyone, you really want your users to keep updated for security reasons and guess what happens once users can no longer update due to a lack of free space? Apple ran into this because they insisted on selling 16GB models well past the time that was not enough space. I applaud Google for making the hard choice of less free space, but more timely updates.

Android correctly gets a lot of flack for having a fragmented user base which makes it a security and developing nightmare, if this feature were to become standard it would help everyone.

It should also be noted that they are giving away unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos which makes leaving some free space for updates a lot less painful. You probably won't fill your phone with app binaries, it's the photos and videos that take up lots of space.

Two times per year? There is an update every month, even if it's just a security update.

Big update, the one which actually takes a long time. Still having less usable userspace for those couple minutes saved is insane.

It's not just about saved minutes. It's also a much safer update mechanism, and it's what is used by a lot of enterprise level network equipment. It allows easy rollback if there's any sort of problem. So it's not just quicker updates, it's quicker, safer updates.

Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE. Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).

> Yeah, so instead of testing their updates, user still has less space JUST IN CASE.

That seems a little short sighted. You seem to assume the only way an update can fail is in because of a software bug, and it's just a matter of not enough testing. If the phone loses power for some reason, or one of the hardware components is misbehaving, I would rather it not brick my phone. This is the industry standard, because shit happens, and CYA is a good thing.

> Sorry, not buying this. If the phone had expandable storage, then yeah maybe, but this is the 16GB story all over again (woops, 11GB actually and less after the Play apps updates).

Buying what? I'm not selling you anything. Is there somewhere I tried to convince you it was ultimately the best solution? I simply explained it had an additional (likely primary) purpose that you were not accounting for.

Security patches prior to N also required recompiling all apps, which takes more than "a couple minutes" for nearly everyone. This, along with not being able to adequately control when & how updates are downloaded & installed, has always been a major pain point. Imho, the new method is a huge improvement in both user friendliness and stability/safety.