[kenhwang]

Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like:

- Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves)

- Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else)

- Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music/TV/Movies/Bloatware must update now, what's a little buffering for the next 20 minutes anyway?)

- Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

It doesn't seem like any of these things would be hard to build. I guess "package manager UX" doesn't look good on a product manager resume.

[on_and_off]

So weird you mention all this, in my experience Google Play does a good job with this. The only thing that really irks me is that if an app while you are using the phone, the foreground app should never get updated. Sure, download the delta patch but wait for me to have stopped using it in order to update (or if I am using the app for hours, pick an update message). To be fair nowadays this only happens when I manually start updating my apps.

[kenhwang]

Mine is set to update on WiFi only. And everyday, without fail, the moment I plug my phone into a power source in the evening (could even be to my computer for debugging), it'll start going through and applying all available updates. The performance impact is always noticeable during the duration of the updates.

Other common case is when I pull into my driveway/office and happen to be charging my phone in the car and it gets into WiFi range. Boom, update everything time.

Google supposedly knows everything about my daily routine, and yet, somehow can't predict when I won't be using my phone. Even something super dumb like, screen off > 2 hours && battery > 80% && connected to wifi would make my autoupdate life much better.

Apple has the opposite problem. "Hey, your computer needs to restart, [Restart Now], [Remind me tomorrow]". [Remind me tomorrow] doesn't mean, oh I noticed that your computer went into sleep before tomorrow I'm going to restart it now. Thanks Apple, I had unsaved state open.

Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to have gotten the apply updates/restart frustration down. Maybe it's from all the flak they've gotten over the years.

[flukus]

There's also that they treat all wifi as the same. I saw my data allowance for a 2 week cruise in a few weeks, it's 250MB total. I wonder how many people burn through that on updates alone. As annoying as windows can be about applying the updates, at least they let you set if a connection is metered or not so it won't download. If only steam and everything else didn't ignore the setting.

> Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to have gotten the apply updates/restart frustration down. Maybe it's from all the flak they've gotten over the years.

Not IME. When I shutdown my computer to go away for Christmas holidays windows decided that this was the perfect time to apply updates. Fortunately it completed on the bus ride and not the flight.

I think we've gone well passed the point of what computers should do on our behalf, everything they try and automate lately just ends up aggravating me.

[spacehunt]

> There's also that they treat all wifi as the same.

You can tell the system which Wifi networks are metered, at least since Lollipop if not earlier.

[flukus]

How? Long pressing brings up nothing relevant (and don't get me started on hidden functionality like that), no swipe actions in the wifi settings, if it's there it's not obvious.

[_9jgl]

On 8.1, it's in Network & Internet/Data usage/Network restrictions. It does seem odd that they put it in the data section, not the wifi section.

[jakobegger]

Regarding unsaved state when restarting, that sounds like an app problem. macOS has gotten extremely good at state restoration and has great APIs for that. Typically my computer screen looks exactly the same after a restart.

So if your app loses state because of an automatic restart, that is really a problem with the app. The developer should either make use of the state restoration APIs (preferred), or at least implement -applicationShouldTerminate: to prevent the reboot when there are unsaved changes.

[on_and_off]

Just my anecdotal experience but Windows stopped me while I was doing something by suddenly rebooting the machine. The update took ages, well, more than 30 minutes, still very annoying.

In the end, the visible change was the addition of Edge and Cortana .. A good way to make me decide to never use these 2 apps.

[simion314]

Agree, why is Windows taking that much time to apply some updates? And you can't do anything while the updates are in progress.

[zach43]

A friend of mine joked that a recent Windows update “downloaded the entire internet and then proceeded to install it”. The next day, I watched with horror as my computer restarted with the same Windows update...it took a similar amount of time (45 minutes to download, 30 minutes to install)

I would really like to know what it was downloading, and why it took so long. My entire windows partition is only 100GB, it would have been faster for me to back up my data, download a new ISO and install Windows from scratch than to just update it.

[Feniks]

In fairness Steam forces updates too. In the old days you could play games without updating to the latest version. Now game updates are mandatory.

So MS followed Valve on this.

[johnchristopher]

> Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

No, no, no. That's how I ended up with a laptop burned screen. Or being woken up by whatever music it was playing at that time. Solution: update when I press the button or when I planned it myself.

[pbhjpbhj]

Just having interruptible updates and an average time to completion would make me hate MS Windows a little less. Like how hard is it too say "your computer needs updating, it takes 20 minutes on average for other users: continue, snooze, or schedule", then have "complete update later" button.

And do their damnedest to get rid of the half-hour wait on reboot whilst it does unknown evil in the background with no indications of action or time to completion ... yes, I've been burnt!

[kenhwang]

Google Play already has the option for manual updates. It will prompt that an update is available and you can press the button to install.

[BorkJames]

The problem is that Windows is designed for the lowest knowledge user, who would never manually prompt for updates because they either think them useless, don't know they are there, or have a "don't fix it if it works" mentality.

[Razengan]

> I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like: > Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves)

iCloud has been doing that for years, with more features and flexibility for both users as well as developers than Steam.

> Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else)

Disable auto-updates and let the user decide. Manually choosing updates works better on the App Store than on Steam.

> Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS all let you choose whether to download OS updates in the background and when to install them.