(rant below!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
It's totally wrong. The sort of stupidity that MS has been doing since release of Win10, though even there you CAN block updates if you are expert.
Some people don't even have WiFi, or even Internet, they rely on a someone else to download books or firmware, and even copy/install it.
Changes in behaviour should be in Read Me, available before update. NEVER remotely after install at a later date. Some changes in updates are plain abusive (Like Kobo and MS have done like adding adverts to GUIs that didn't have them to HW you bought ages ago).
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Oh, I agree, as someone who spends a lot of his time working from the far end of a 10GiB/month un-expandable satellite internet connection, in a Yorkshire valley with no mobile signal -- but unfortunately all the big tech companies are US west coasters who assume network bandwidth is ubiquitous and free. At the very least the damn updates should be revertable, since they have demonstrably had ones that didn't work very well beforehand and others that change UI in ways users might dislike. But noooo, they'll come down when Amazon wants, what of course you had 300MiB of spare bandwidth, you weren't planning to *use* that for anything were you? (It could be worse: it could be a mobile phone. Here's Android 9, it's wonderful! it changes almost nothing you can see and used half your monthly bandwidth and you have no choice about receiving it and the other phone in the household is about to get it as well. You didn't want to do anything else with the Internet this month, did you?)
I mean even Windows 10 lets you say "this is an expensive connection, plz do not bomb me with 5GiB of malfunctioning feature updates over this link". But phones and e-readers? Nooooo...
(Sorry, pet peeve.
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The real problem is that Amazon is fundamentally a marriage of a retailer and a huge cloud computing company, and software distribution is very much in the hands of the cloud computing side of things -- they are, after all, very good at it: if it ever fails it's headline news all over the world, after all. The alpha-beta incremental rollout scheme *works*, and works something like 99.99999% of the time. Unfortunately they don't entirely grasp that limited-battery portable devices are not always-on, that not everyone even *has* always-on Internet connectivity, and that alpha-beta rollouts/rollbacks work better when they relate to features that are invisible to users (and also it works better when automatic rollback is implemented, which it very much isn't for Kindles, which makes every upgrade a heart-in-mouth am-I-about-to-lose-everything event, at least for me). At least this one requires a restart to appear: page flip's sudden appearance felt really weird, popping up abruptly when all I'd done was go online to download a new book...