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by victoro0 2442 days ago
I think that a lot of people miss the point that most people don't care about updates. Most people want a phone that does the same thing when it was bought and as many years later as possible, as the battery allows.

It's the same thing around passwords. People don't use weak passwords or reuse their passwords because they don't know any better, they do it because they do not care about whatever is protected by the password. I personally couldn't care less if someone stole my Facebook or that some bad actor may abuse something in my phone to send something to China. These digital things rank very low on the list of my priorities, and like me are a lot of not very technical interested people.

Some people buy cheap phones knowing they won't get updates, we know, we don't care. And we are happy to have the option not to care, we do not want more expensive phone with constant updates, just like we don't want the mandatory use of password managers. If we cared we'd buy/use them.

8 comments

> It's the same thing around passwords. People don't use weak passwords or reuse their passwords because they don't know any better, they do it because they do not care about whatever is protected by the password.

This is quite often false from my experience talking with people using bad passwords. The most frequent reason seems to be a basic misunderstanding of the problem, i.e. "But who would ever think of trying and manage guessing CowMilk76$ as my password."

So it mostly boils down to not being aware of computer assisted cracking, let alone modern cracking techniques with rules and statistics. They are imagining someone targeting them specifically, using their own hands and imagination. From that perspective, it is quite ludicrous to think someone would be able to crack CowMilk76$ as their password practically.

IME people choose weak passwords because they need to be able to remember them and technical people seem to forget this. If they're complicated or too long then the forgotten password option becomes how they log into things, making the password essentially useless.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but longer and more complicated passwords aren't.

Seeing that 80%+ of iOS users update to the latest OS within the first 3 months according to Apple’s charts, why would you think that if Android users could update they wouldn’t?
In less than a month iOS 13 has already passed iOS 12.

https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_13

Yes, if users get a notification that says "hit this button to update" they'll do it. The question is whether they see that as a substantive benefit. I would predict that most users don't care, just like most don't care about filesystem access or sideloading.
The Apple iPhone event gets millions of views every year. People know that their is a new iPhone OS coming out.
I'd say this is one of the things Apple has been very successful at. Releasing a new version of iOS has become a highly anticipated event for a staggeringly large portion of the user base. From the way they handle updates on a software level (auto-updates and persistent notifications) and on a social level (turning it into a large PR event tied to their new generation of devices). It's something Google was never able to do, and I don't think it's any accident that Android updates are lagging so badly.

I think there'd be a veritable shitstorm if, say, AT&T suddenly decided to withhold iOS 13 for 6-12 months, while it's effectively SOP for Android devices (where you have manufacturers needing months to release a new version, then providers who delay it even further to test ... something).

Apple did it right by completely cutting carriers out of the update loop. I don’t think AT&T could possibly do that even if they wanted to.
Well put. Apple _pushes_ OS updates to OEMs/Telcos. Google _hopes_ the OEMs/Telcos _pull_ the updates.
iOS is very annoying about updating. It's much less work to update than to constantly ignore warnings. High adoption rates therefore don't invalidate OPs point.
I hate that iOS downloads the updates in the background and uses up data quotas without warning and without consent from the user. The only solution to prevent inadvertently updating is to go to the storage settings and delete the downloaded update, only to have it get downloaded automatically again in a matter of days or weeks.
Low Data Mode in iOS 13 should make this stop (although they don't say it on the support page, it shouldn't do it if they are blocking App Store/iCloud updates...)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210596

I'd go one step further and say that most people don't want updates, precisely because updates will potentially break things they rely on, and the Android ecosystem moves so fast that it's almost always the case, at least in my experience. I never had an Android update without having several apps breaking.
I think you're right and I'd go even further and say most people don't want updates because they know that basically anything could change. I imagine non-IT folk look at computers like appliances, and so I can sympathize because If I woke up every 6 months to find all my appliances interfaces had rearranged themselves, I'd never update anything.
I work in IT and I absolutely loathe Android updates, every time I update my phone the update will break something, or at least the interface for something I use frequently will change again, I absolutely hate it. I still install them because it's impossible to get just the security patches without the rest, but if I could I would go back to the OS my phone shipped with in a heartbeat.
Updates are a vehicle, what people want is new shiny things and their pains eased.

In my experience, people don't want updates until they want some emoji, app, UI animation etc. that is highly desired but they cannot have it.

When they encounter such a situation, they hate it and feel bad for their poor choice of device. It is very off-putting when you cannot have that small thing that all your friends have without making a serious investment of time and money to upgrade to a new device.

iOS users very rarely have those bad experiences, when the new iOS is out even many non-technical users will get excited because they will be exploring the new shiny features and designs with their friends and nobody is left out. If some feature is missing, they will understand that their device is old but they will still get some shiny things and almost never missing stuff that is alienatingly bad.

Just a quick note about the passwords. If a bad actor steals your Facebook password and then messages all your contacts saying he (you) is on holiday and his cards have been stolen, but PayPal is accepted at the local restaurant...could he lend you some money until you get back. Are you bothered now you know that your friends are protected by that password too?
I wonder how common that is. I believe I had a trivial password on HN and on Facebook. Six zeroes on HN and dictword121212 on Facebook and no one ever did anything.
I used a weak password for some throwaway account many years ago (I think it may have been Yahoo). Now I'm receiving daily ransom demands from someone quoting this password back to me threatening to expose my porn habits and whatnot :-)

That email comes in so many variants it's really entertaining. Someone is really trying hard to find the magic wording that gets through spam filters and makes people pay. It's not getting through my spam filter sadly, so when I want to read the latest episode I have to go look for it in the spam folder.

So I think what's far more important than choosing strong passwords is choosing different ones for each account.

That exact scam has happened to people I know. I don't think anyone actually fell for it, though -- the fake distress call wasn't very convincing. It's easy to imagine how it could have been.
I think it's more likely that people don't know or think about updates.
It’s more because the manufacturers and service providers (some would say intentionally) make Android updates much more difficult than necessary. It’s one of the (many) trade-offs between a walled garden like Apple and an “open” ecosystem like Android.

If the manufacturer still imposes this level of control over the average user, it’s sort of just a worse version of a walled garden, isn’t it?

The update situation being such a mess on android has very little to do with it not being a walled garden, Windows manages to not be a walled garden and still have updates.
And Microsoft has now become quite infamous for forcing updates on the unwary--to the point that people now produce webcomics about it. I don't see that as an improvement.

The real problem with updates is all the crapware that companies like Samsung foist on people. It's shitty software that never works right but still gets delivered and then its brokenness is in the way of an operating system update because of how shitty it is.

No, the real problem with updates is that they don't exist.
You're not wrong, really. But what Microsoft has always done differently is control the distribution and installation of their own updates. With Android it's always been up to a combination of Google releasing the update, the manufacturer putting their touches on it and then the service provider releasing it. Of course a savvy user could get the update as soon as it is available in some cases (in other cases it'll break your phone).

I'm not advocating for really any particular way of doing it, but rather just noting how Apple definitely has the opportunity for making OS updates a smoother experience than either Microsoft or Google because of their level of control at the hardware level. Apple doesn't always get it right (see Catalina), but they could do better than they do.

Same kind of customization could be done with Windows CE and PocketPC devices, yet there were updates available.
Or just that those updates don't exist? My phone will probably be never updated to Android 10.
Totally. I wonder if the wrong people at Apple and/or Google drank their own cool aid. Maybe they truly believe that the majority of their users wait for the next OS version with baited breath, ready and willing to incorporate whatever new features/apps the update force-feeds them into their "digital lifestyle", and truly learning and savoring all the new UX-mechanisms and redesigns they're handed. From the way these things are presented, it seems that they truly believe this. And some years ago there were many users like this.

These days, most people I know, both on the iOS and Android side of things, approach updates with a resigned sigh of "what are they going to make me relearn for no reason this time?" with a healthy pinch of "man I hope this doesn't break anything." If Apple/Google owned up to this reality, maybe the updates would be smoother.

> And we are happy to have the option not to care

Good for you. But those that do care have worryingly few options.