How often do you update your apps on your devices?

me:

  • android: 2x per year, except some app needs an update to work
  • linux/manjaro: every few months, except security stuff (ik its a rolling release distro but I hate updating frequently)

A while ago I updated mostly directly after publish. But since more and more apps (primarily Google services, Social Media, …) get shitty updates which include AI and bloat, I try to update as less as possible while stil trying to get important and new features.
But many apps freak out when not applying these updates in this timespan, which makes it really annoying when needing an app urgently. Then having to update them with eventually bad network makes me aggressive.

Which are your opinions?

  • PerhyteEnglish
    1•28 days ago

    My Linux laptop is set to check for updates daily, which I then apply manually when I notice the tray icon. I sometimes procrastinate when it comes to reboots though.

    My Android phone is on auto-update, which seems to mean whenever it’s being charging for a few hours (so typically when charging overnight). Because the battery is still pretty good and I don’t need to charge daily, that comes down to once every 2-3 nights or so.

    My personal Linux servers (which run my self-hosted apps) are configured to automatically apply all updates (and reboot if necessary afterwards) at the time of day I’m most likely to be awake and available to manually fix stuff if anything goes wrong. The Docker-containers that run on them mostly get auto-updated to the latest version every 6 hours by Watchtower. A few containers have more cautious policies though, ranging from pinning a major version (but auto-upgrading to new minor versions within that) to pinning a specific version and at most sending a notification if there’s an update. The latter is limited to stuff that has broken before and/or where newer releases are known to be buggy or incompatible.

    When it comes to major updates (i.e. new distro releases) of my Linux machines, I typically wait about a month before upgrading because I’ve been bitten by release-day bugs before.