That's fine as far as wish lists go. But depending on the kind of software we're talking about, meeting those demands could become expensive and confusing prett

That's fine as far as wish lists go. But depending on the kind of software we're talking about, meeting those demands could become expensive and confusing pretty quickly. What about users running different versions of the software on different devices while expecting everything sync correctly? What about communicating with versions run by other users? What about the server side of the app? How many different client versions are you going to support for how long, and what does that mean for database schemas, etc? Over time, there will be an enormous combinatorial explosion of possible system states and state transitions that will inevitably cause bugs and confusing situations for users. You'd have to architect everything for forward and backward compatibility - protocols, schemas and all the rest of it. How do you deal with all the complexity without quickly accumulating unmanagable technical debt? I agree that there are a lot of gratuitous and sloppy automatic upgrades that ignore user interests. I also agree that there are types of software where letting users keep old versions is not a problem at all. But I don't think this debate is complete without also talking about the issues that remain after accounting for bad faith, incompetence, greed and negligence.