> there is a point of view which says that you make good products through thoughtful and rigorous design, rather than pouring over databases of events to try an

> there is a point of view which says that you make good products through thoughtful and rigorous design, rather than pouring over databases of events to try and reverse engineer how people are actually using your product There are two problems with this view. The first is that it's generally user-hostile. If you're meaning your software to be useful to users, then you need to see what your users' needs are, and how they're actually using your software - not how you think they should be. There are people who design pieces of software that are meant to be opinionated, beautiful gems that are not meant to be used by others (which includes software that pays lip-service to users but is so user-hostile that it's effectively not for them anyway) - and telemetry, crash reports, auto-updates, and more generally a feedback loop from user to developer are not for them. The second is that it requires a lot of discipline. Look at how user-hostile most applications (both open-source and proprietary) are anyway - do you really think that their developers are going to have the discipline to carefully engineer a good user experience? As an idealist, I wish that they did, but as a realist, I know that in most cases that will never happen, and so telemetry and crash reports (crashing is part of a bad user experience) will get you a slightly better piece of software than nothing at all.