Stop this continual applications update madness now!
I can’t really be the only person on the planet sick and tired of the endless barrage of app shop updates, surely? Once you have been using a certain number of apps on your smartphone — surveys suggest that the average Android user has around 95 applications — one soon finds oneself subjected to a constant flow of requests to update software: every few days, some app or other asks to be updated.
For most people saying no to update notifications is too radical; after all, in some cases, the updates are worthwhile. The problem with manual supervision is that one gets a drip, drip, drip of notifications. The different strategies of each developer, along with the constant entry into the market of new apps, now means that what was once an occasional chore has become a near-daily bore.
Aside from the problems of requiring WiFi every time an update is required — otherwise you’ll be using up your flat data rate plan pretty quickly — unsupervised options are generally inconvenient, after all we use our smartphones throughout the day, and it’s not always possible to find time to update.
Add to this the further task of not updating bloatware, or apps that come with the device and that cannot easily be eliminated, and that many users prefer simply to turn off, the task of maintenance means manually approving updates of those apps that we use regularly, one by one.
At the same time, the speed with which some apps appear to require updating defies understanding, and is certainly an imposition by the companies concerned. We are beginning to see the need for some guidelines from operating systems to provide a balance between providing new functions or sorting out glitches, and the hassle of constantly sending new versions that the user needs to download and install every few days: an average of 90 apps updating themselves every few weeks is clearly too much. I for one am beginning to miss the days when updates only took place every couple of years.
Fine: technology progresses at light speed. But the current applications platforms, all operating independently, means that users are being driven insane with partial updates, or worse, what seems to be a policy of manufacturers sending out a first version, waiting to see what its problems are, and then a few days later sending out another version, as though the marketplace had now become a permanent beta.
As I said at the beginning of this article: am I the only person who finds this a hassle? What are your tactics for dealing with the curse of the constant update?
(En español, aquí)
