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Musings

When Software upgrade is a downgrade

I expect upgrade to be newer, faster, better versions of the existing models. Traditionally they had additional functionality, increased utility, yielded higher productivity and had better aesthetics.
On the contrary, the upgrades often are bulkier, consume more battery and often have bugs with erratic behavior. The only change will be that many of the Freeium apps will have newer set ever annoying ads. Are the upgrades a ruse to make you feel that your phone’s battery, processor & storage are insufficient? Why is a deliberate deterioration of user experience & sufficiency of hardware called upgrade?
Every week there would be 20-50 different apps that would require an upgrade. Every month there will be an operating system upgrade. If you ignore the upgrade, then like the distant windows desktop cousin, you will get annoying pop-up reminders every time you unlock the phone and the apps will suddenly stop functioning due to compatibility issues. If you accept the alleged upgrades, then 1GB of data will disappear every week at a huge cost to your wallet if you are on the GSM data plan.
My problem is not the frequency or the data cost, but the very concept of the updates. Often there are no apparent incremental gains that I would expect. What’s worse the infamous Feb 2016 iphone upgrade introduced ‘Error 53’ which killed the cherished device of many. So many people
A friend told me that updates are a method to collect personal data & usage heuristics from your phone. It also plays around loopholes in the ranking mechanism of app stores by bloating the number of downloads & active users. If these are the only two reasons, then I should do a factory reset of my phone and disable google store forever.

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