Aura HD Trouble with Wifi

[robko]

Originally Posted by jackastor

You know if they did supply a download link its not sideloading when someone loads a firmware direct from kobo. This sideloading crap is basically just bs that some one made up to justify calling it sideloading. plain and simple.

regards

Jack

So how many people on this forum (which is a pretty small subset of all users) have managed despite the warnings in the thread have managed to put the wrong firmware on their device and at least temporarily brick it? I can understand why Kobo wouldn't want to officially expose themselves to having to deal with that even if I understand why it would be nice to have those links. Yes, it's possible that they could add code to prevent that, but maybe it's more complex than it appears. And it adds one more complication for a customer service desk (that can't always handle things at this point) to figure out.

[TechniSol]

I agree that with the current system people could download and upgrade with the wrong software. But, that doesn't mean it couldn't be improved.

Why do they stagger OTA firmware upgrades? Likely to avoid killing everyone's reader if there is a problem in rolling it out. Why not roll it out to their BETA TESTERS which should be a representative pool of hardware first and give it 24-48 hours just to make sure all the betas are good with it? It seems to me they are too dumb or too arrogant to use the beta testers as they should. I'm not saying that is the case, but for lack of evidence to the contrary and taking into account the way other things are handled one might suppose.

As for the other end of it, there is no reason a section of code(a patch) couldn't be written and distributed for those in areas requiring certain versions, or with particular model readers, that forces the current version to look for a particular identifier or certain text in a file, etc., before it updates from .kobo directory. That stuff has been done over and over along with checksums for umpty ump years. We did something similar with an eprom burning software to make it largely bulletproof back in the 1980's for heaven's sake. It was overkill as we had the technical backgrounds to deal without it, but it wasn't a terrible idea, just overkill considering the user pool.

[PeterT]

Don't laugh... the beta testers of late have received earlier builds of the released code, and then, a few days later get access to the same build as the rest of you have started to receive.

[samhy]

Originally Posted by TechniSol

Why do they stagger OTA firmware upgrades? Likely to avoid killing everyone's reader if there is a problem in rolling it out.

Somehow I always thought that, apart for the reason you gave, it was also to avoid too much traffic at once on the servers. Don't forget that a Kobo update, unlike an Amazon or a Sony one (and maybe almost every other maker too), will be downloaded on all the devices since it is not model specific.