It's pretty well-accepted that OTA updates for games lowered quality across the board. Anecdotally, I've seen the same in general software. Traditional produc

It's pretty well-accepted that OTA updates for games lowered quality across the board. Anecdotally, I've seen the same in general software. Traditional product recalls are very expensive, but they centralize costs on the manufacturer, and disperse much smaller individual costs across all consumers. In doing so, they incentivize manufacturers to not screw up. OTA externalizes costs to consumers, increasing their individual cost through the disruption of more regular updates and regressions, security issues, etc, while decreasing the manufacturers costs dramatically. This -- surprise! -- incentivizes shipping crap. Long-term manufacturers can lose brand goodwill due to shipping a buggy product, but if everyone is shipping crap, it's not like consumers have a choice or even particularly high expectations.