
How often do iOS users update? - The Pareto Distribution - cornmander
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2013/5/how-often-do-you-update%253F-%252D-the-pareto-principle
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chrisa
Those numbers are close to my app's update rates as well. I found it
surprising that it happened so quickly too, but then noticed how my wife
updates her apps: she hates those little red numbers, so will update almost
immediately to make them go away.

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corylehey
there are two types of people in this world, those who can tolerate the red
badges on their apps and those who cant

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MatthewPhillips
My fiance absolutely never updates and also never clears her notifications.
She only uses her phone when she wants to... use her phone.

And actually, I think that's the rational approach. Updating is a horrible
experience. "Hey, guess what! You can't do anything while these 10 apps are
updating. And guess what, the one you need is in the back of the queue. And a
large game is in the front. You're not getting anything done for a while!"

Background auto-updating should be the default on all OSes.

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BoyWizard
Having not owned an iPhone, I just want to clarify: when you update an app, it
does so in the foreground? That seems like an odd design decision. Would there
be any reason for that to happen, as opposed to in the background (a la
Android)?

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lh7777
Depends on what you mean by background. You can't use an iOS app while it is
being updated (or in the queue to be updated), but you can do anything else.
I'd call that a background update.

~~~
BoyWizard
Gotcha. I foreground == can't use the phone while the app is updating. Seems
like it uses a similar mechanism to Android app updates then.

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nwhitehead
Wow, that graph is very surprising to me. I only update apps when I update iOS
(very rarely). I find it supremely annoying to update things manually. I would
worry that the population being captured is not representative of the general
app using population.

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k-mcgrady
>> "I find it supremely annoying to update things manually"

What's annoying about it? It only takes two/three taps:

1\. App Store

2\. Updates tab

3\. 'Update all'

A password isn't even required anymore. Personally I don't see how anyone
could find that annoying but even if they did most app updates come with new
features and the benefits of those far outweigh the 10 seconds of time it took
to update.

~~~
bentcorner
Some design issues prevent me from updating regularly and when I do, it's a
painful process.

1.) Installing applications of size X generally requires 2X amount of space.
I'm not a dev so I don't know what happens under the covers, but I can
understand why (copy compress package, unpack/uncompress and deploy to
filesystem)

2.) When you update, it's an all-or-none proposition with the "Update All"
button

3.) Because of 1 & 2, if you're low on space and one application is too big to
update, when you press the "Update All" button you get an error message and
nothing gets updated

So, I now have a red "93" on my App Store icon, and unless I want to manually
go and update each non-big app individually, that's how it's going to stay.

Bonus: Loading the icons in the "Update" screen impacts the UI something
fierce (as does updating, I guess), so Updating individual apps is an exercise
in frustration. This scales linearly with the number of apps you need to
update, so at this point I'm past the point of no return and will likely not
update an app unless it complains directly to me. Even better, _finding_ the
app in the update screen is painful since they're sorted by time and not name,
so it's nearing the point where if I can't use your app because you complain
to me, and you're not an absolutely essential application, I'll probably just
delete you.

~~~
Zev
Re: Your first point, the App Store uses delta updates now, so, it doesn't
download/replace files that haven't changed.

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jsmcallister
My wife never updates her iOS apps. Any lawyers here able to tell me whether
that constitutes "irreconcilable differences" ?

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patmcguire
For me it's the Peter Principle - update until the app becomes worse than it
was before. I don't trust them not to ruin more things in the future and I
can't really revert, so that's where things stay.

~~~
youngerdryas
If it is an app you care about then you better go read the reviews before
updating because you cannot roll back.

~~~
pixelcort
Sure you can, if you have a backup of the ipa file on your computer.

~~~
youngerdryas
I haven't connected my phone to my computer for years so that won't really
work for me, but yeah you could go that way.

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woobar
Technically, you don't need to _connect_ your phone to the computer. It will
do it w/o your intervention. I backup/sync all devices in the family to one
computer over Wi-Fi.

~~~
youngerdryas
Can you roll back to a previous version of an app using iCloud after you
update? I don't think so.

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woobar
How does iCloud comes into this picture?

Grandparent suggested using iTunes on computer for ipa backups. I've added
that you don't need to connect your phone to that computer.

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lobster45
I only update the apps when I had a chance to read the reviews. Often the
latest versions have bugs and may reduce the functionality, so I make sure
there is an improvement before updating. For example, I have my old kindle app
from 2011 that allows in-app purchases.

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VintageCool
Our server API still receives noticeable traffic for versions of the app that
date back to late 2011 when we first launched.

~~~
zmitri
Same. A lot of people don't update ever unfortunately.

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koyote
I wonder how this compares to Android users, where (I presume) many users have
auto-update turned on.

~~~
dhruvmittal
I'm also pretty curious about this. I'd assumed that auto-update was a pretty
basic feature and that of course iOS would have it- it's only with this
thread/article that i'm discovering otherwise. Is there any particular reason
that iOS doesn't do automatic updates in the background? I've just got "update
automatically on WiFi only" set up on my Android phone and I've never had any
problems.

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sph130
Here's their decision: Update or Delete. People don't like that extra
notification laying there. So you will either retain them or loose them when
you update. Some who are disengaged will just update all, but those users you
care about will either update or delete.

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HaloZero
I'd like to point out that Octopart customer base is probably tech friendly
(as they are an electronic parts search engine), I would be more curious about
numbers from an app geared toward general consumers such as Yelp.

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brilee
That curve fitting seems a bit off in the middle and at the tail. What does
the log plot show? Log-log plot? That will nail down a power law or
exponential law if there is one.

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quahada
Along these lines, it was surprising to me that many non-techies never close
out their apps. They leave them running in the background and are not even
aware it was possible to close an app.

As a developer, this means the only time many users will "restart" the app is
when they update, and the restart is forced upon them. So make sure your apps
are stable!

~~~
snprbob86
More surprising to me is that ANYONE closes out their apps.

I've never ever ever pressed that little red (-) icon. On pretty rare
occasion, I need to hold _power_ and then hold _home_ to kill an unresponsive
app. But I've never "quit" an app when I was done with it. I've had an iPhone
since the beginning and my battery life and performance has always been
stellar. Only apps that passively use GPS have been a problem , so I uninstall
those.

This is also (mostly) true on my Mac as well. I leave DOZENS of apps running
and only kill them if they start sucking down CPU cycles. Generally, most apps
sit there, do nothing, and get paged out to the flash disk.

I'm also a little annoyed each time I meet a non-techie who had some techie
tell them "Oh, here's how you close apps. It will make your phone faster." Try
as I might, I can't convince my girlfriend that it has absolutely no effect.
She religiously closes every single app in that little tray once or twice a
day.

It's 2013 people. We don't (shouldn't?) need to manually manage memory for our
computers.

~~~
fotbr
It's not always about memory. With my (current iOS, but not current hardware)
iPhone, it's about battery life - for whatever reason, applications that use
the camera dramatically drop battery power even if the app isn't "active".

It shouldn't be that way, but it is, and the only way I have to control it is
to go manually quit certain applications when I'm done with them.

~~~
snprbob86
> applications that use the camera dramatically drop battery power even if the
> app isn't "active"

Do you have any evidence of this? Have you run a controlled experiment?
Because that makes zero sense. I'm 99% sure that you've been conditioned to
press a placebo button.

~~~
fotbr
Others (and you) note battery drain when the gps circuits are used, why does
it make "zero sense" that current draw is higher when the camera is powered
on, vs when it's off?

To answer your question though, yes, I have experimented several times over
the nearly three years I've owned the phone (plain old iPhone 4 from sept
2010). From a full charge, airplane mode on (turn off the RF drain and
minimize outside events -- namely texts and phone calls that I cannot
control), phone set to sleep after 1 minute, screen brightness minimum, and
with nothing else running, I can start the camera app (pre-configured to be in
still photo mode, with flash set to "off"), hit the home button to drop the
camera app to the "background", start and then quit the notes app to make sure
the last thing I did was something other than the camera app, and doing
nothing else with the phone -- lay it on the coffee table and literally do not
touch it -- will drain the battery in about 3 hours, 4 max. Doing the same
routine, but quitting the camera app, then starting and quitting the notes app
and I can leave the phone on the coffee table for days (although I usually
give up after about three and start using the phone again).

Everything else I can (and do) leave running with no ill effect.

Bug in the OS? Bug in the built in camera app? Something defective in my
battery/phone? Perhaps -- I don't know, and don't really care. I just make a
point to turn the camera app off when I'm done with it. Since I usually have a
DSLR with me, I rarely reach for my phone for photos in the first place, so it
simply isn't that big of an issue.

